


The Red Lantern Corps

by kayeslin



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, More characters to be added later, unreliable narrators will cause character bias
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-11-22 07:57:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11375919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayeslin/pseuds/kayeslin
Summary: Laurel Lance went missing 8 years ago and Tommy and Thea were the only ones who realized it. Even after everything they've seen though, all the super powers and magic, they really weren't expecting what they found when they went looking for her.





	1. Suspicion

Laurel Lance was missing. Not according to the police, as no missing persons’ report had ever been filed, but according to Thea and Tommy. They knew, but unfortunately it was hard convincing anyone else of that fact.

-

“When was the last time you talked to Laurel?” Thea asked Detective Lance the last time he was in the Arrowcave scolding Oliver for causing a mess for the real cops.

“I dunno,” he said absentmindedly, scrolling on his phone reading angry emails from his bosses at city hall, “a week ago, I think.”

“In person or on the phone?”

Quentin stopped scrolling and looked up to give Thea a withering look.

“Well Laurel doesn’t live in the city, so let’s go with phone.”

“Right right of course,” Thea said. Quentin turned his back to walk out the door when she stopped him again.

“When is she coming to visit again?”

“Ask her yourself,” he said shortly.

“You know I get sent to voicemail more than I get her,” Thea said slowly, watching to see Quentin’s reaction. “Does that happen to you, too? It always seems like the only time I talk to Laurel is when she calls me.”

Quentin hadn’t stopped or even slowed on his way to the door.

“Sounds about right,” he said. “She’s busy. So am I.” Then he left.

-

“Hey Detective Lance, I’m leaving for Egypt in a few days. Do you want a post card of the pyramids or the Sphinx?” Tommy asked a few days later when he ran into Quentin at the third precinct-adjacent coffee shop he tried that day to make their meeting seem casual and coincidental.

“Oh don’t get me a thing, Tommy, you being gone will be present enough,” Quentin said. He looked at his watch as if debating how many hours he could really go without his next cup of coffee if it could help him avoid talking to Tommy Merlyn. 

“Right right of course,” Tommy said. Quentin shot him a sideways glance but Tommy continued before he could say anything else. “What do you think Laurel would want? Actually do you have her address? You know us millennials, we don’t keep good address books.”

“Why don’t you just focus on whatever work you’ve got to do in Egypt and leave me and my daughter out of it, huh Tommy?”

And Quentin walked right out of the line and out of the coffee shop.

-

“Sara, I’m so glad I caught you before you left,” Thea said. Sara smiled like that was the nicest thing Thea had ever said to her, which made Thea feel a little guilty when she immediately turned it around to “Hey I just realized I never asked have you talked to Laurel since you left the League?”

“Um,” Sara said, and she had never looked more like her father than right then. “No.”

“Do you want her number? I mean with you leaving to galavant around the time stream you might want to say goodbye.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Thea,” Sara said. Thea ramped up to push harder, but Sara beat her to it. “I haven’t actually talked to her since the island. Well, since I left for the Gambit, technically.” 

Thea’s gameplan was now out the window, because she hadn’t even considered the fact that Sara and Laurel hadn’t had any communication since Sara and Oliver left on their little doomed love boat. Laurel definitely knew Oliver was alive, since Thea was the one who told her (that had been one of the first red flags for Thea, since Laurel had called Thea well over a month after Ollie came back with no idea, despite the absurd level of news coverage it had gotten). She knows she and Laurel talked about Sara once, but since Quentin was proving to be the most non confrontational person Thea knew she had assumed it was Sara herself who’d reached out. But if neither sister reached out to the other - it made this whole thing worse than Thea originally thought.

-

“I think we’re the only ones who can help Laurel,” Thea said to Tommy once she fled as quickly as she could from the awkward conversation with Sara before it could go even worse.

“Yeah obviously,” Tommy said, “no one else has noticed in 8 years that maybe it’s weird no one we know has seen her in person.”

“No Tommy,” Thea said, “it’s not just that no one else thinks it’s weird.” She made sure he was looking at her before she continued, “It’s that no one is even looking. No one has wanted to see her in 8 years.”

“No one but us,” Tommy finished for her.

They didn’t think of themselves as brother and sister. They were, but they had never talked about it with each other. They had each talked to Oliver about it, but never each other. The thought crossed both their minds in that moment, though. And isn’t it remarkable how sibling-like a dynamic can feel as soon as it’s you against the world?

And what a thing to bring them together. Laurel Lance. Sure, she had been a staple in Thea and Tommy’s life as far back as either could remember, but so was the kid you shared a class with since kindergarten but still couldn’t really remember if their name was Tim or Jim. Before all this, she was just Oliver’s girlfriend to both of them.

-

Tommy had hung out with her without Oliver barely a handful of times over the course of over a decade. When they did hang out as the three of them or in larger groups they had a blast. They had a similar sense of humor, similar taste in movies and food. They were friends, but Tommy didn’t think he had ever called Laurel on the phone once before the Gambit sunk and he reached out to see if she was ok. She wasn’t. They got together for drinks, Laurel cried on his shoulder, they slept together, and then they agreed to never mention it again out of sheer embarrassment. A few months later when the word around town was that her mother was leaving town, he called her for the second time in his life. They got together for coffee this time, they slept together on purpose, and the next morning she left for a camping trip she said could take a weekend or until she started law school in the fall, she didn’t know. 

Tommy let her leave and left her alone for a week, but then started calling in earnest. They all went to voicemail. He figured she was ghosting him and tried to just let her, but one night about two months after she left he got sad and exactly as desperate as he didn’t want to appear and called her from the bathroom of a bar and left the first of what would be many drunk messages.

-

Thea had never once been in a room alone with Laurel. She hadn’t called after the Gambit sunk to check on Laurel, hadn’t spared her a single thought until they ran into each other by pure coincidence in a gas station just outside of town. Laurel was fueling up to head into the mountains for some fresh air, Thea was ditching school with some older boys who made her feel less invisible. Laurel didn’t call her mother, or tell her she was a selfish idiot; she just told her to be safe. She gave her a hug, her phone number, and told her that she was her own boss who made her own choices and decided how important she was on her own. It was that kind of casual confidence that had always made Thea like Laurel, despite rarely thinking of her when she wasn’t in the room or being brought up by Oliver. Laurel’s eyes were red that day, but then again so were Thea’s. She imagined that like Thea, Laurel’s eyes had been red ever since she, too, lost the two most important people in her life. 

Thea had tortured herself for days debating whether to call Laurel or not, only to go straight to voicemail once she did. She pushed the disappointment down and didn’t think of it again until two years later when she was following Tommy around at some celebration for the police department because he was the youngest person there besides herself. She had been a bit nasty, pointing over to Quentin Lance doing a terrible job of hiding his flask in a corner despite the fact that he was supposed be honored later, but Tommy had been just as nasty with his response.

“Yeah his drunk ass chased away his wife and the only daughter he had left, you’d think that would have been a wake up call,” Tommy had said.

And like years before when Thea would only think about Laurel whenever Oliver got all moon-eyed, Thea suddenly remembered that Laurel existed and was a person that Thea actually liked quite a bit.

“Oh. Did Laurel leave town for good?” She shouldn’t have been hurt, not really. It’s not like Thea expected a goodbye. Laurel had only missed one call from Thea before Thea gave up and never tried again but it was just…Thea didn’t know what it just was. She had technically gotten a goodbye, she guessed, but it was just supposed to be temporary. Temporary like Oliver and their dad saying they’d see her in a few weeks.

“I mean I guess. She said she was going camping, maybe some traveling after that, but she didn’t know for how long. I mean last I talked to her she had officially declined Starling Law School and accepted Gotham so why would she come back to this place when she’s got such a great out.” Tommy finished his drink in one huge gulp before grabbing another. Thea grabbed one too to look cool.

“I wish I could ditch this town,” she said as she started drinking the wine. It tasted terrible, but she was determined not to make a face. She was a Queen, she was sure she’d get a taste for wine with enough practice. Tommy looked at her in a way that made her think she had definitely made a face before nodding his agreement. 

Thea and Tommy had both gone home from that party not thinking about Laurel. And they didn’t think about her the next day either. But the day after that they started wondering. Why did Laurel leave town without telling anyone? Or did she tell someone? Neither of them were particularly close with her, but the only two people they knew who were had died on a boat so they weren’t sure who to ask to clarify where exactly she’d gone. Her Facebook didn’t answer any questions, but it had been untouched since the Gambit crashed and even before that was mostly just pictures from parties and other events. Her last status update had actually been written by Oliver a week before he left town with her sister, so it was pretty awkward to stalk.

They both then went with the direct approach and called her again. And got voicemail again. Tommy hung up in frustration and vowed to stop thinking about his dead best friend’s girlfriend, but Thea had groaned when the voicemail message started and thus didn’t hear it finishing. She noticed she hadn’t hung up when she heard the beep and figured, well since she’s there anyway might as well leave a message.

“Uuggghhhh,” her message started. “Oh wait it’s recording. Um, hi Laurel. It’s Thea. Thea Que-. Yeah it’s me. Um. Hope your camping trip went alright. I, uh, ran into Tommy the other night and he, um, mentioned you were going to Gotham Law, I think? I was just, um, how’s that? Yeah so call me back, if you want, please, because I think Gotham is cool and maybe I might want to go there for school. And if you go there, then you can tell me? How the town is? Ok bye.”

It wasn’t her best message.

But surprisingly the next day she’d gotten a call from an unknown number, and she screened it obviously, but the caller left an only slightly more comprehensive voicemail.

“…………,” the message started. “Hey Thea. It’s me. I mean it’s Laurel. I got your message. Also a,” she was silent for another long period of time. “new phone. This is the number, if you want to,” another agonizingly long silence, “call me, I guess? Gotham is…great. I, uh, love it. It’s really hard though, I mean I’m busy a lot. So I might still miss you if you call. So why don’t you text me instead? Or you can call and if it goes to voicemail you can tell me when…no that won’t work I won’t know…I think text will work best. Or I’ll call you in…some time? Bye, Thea. It was…It was really great to hear from you. Thanks for-”

Thea never found out what Laurel was thanking her for because that was the end of the message. And she did text (and was so thankful to text rather than call that she didn’t question the intensely bizarre reasons for not being able to call) but it never came up. They talked about Gotham at first but Thea didn’t actually care and Laurel was frankly a bit boring with her descriptions that all sounded like Laurel was also editing the town’s wiki in her spare time so they moved on to other topics. 

Thea didn’t know it at the time, but Laurel was talking to Tommy too. She had texted him the same day she left a message for Thea. She made no mention of his many drunk dials (for which he was thankful) and instead they started from scratch. Tommy knew Laurel was talking to Thea, but it never came up when Tommy and Thea would very occasionally see each other at social events their parents dragged them to. They both knew that she was talking to her dad, too, and knew that apparently there had been a sizable chunk of time when she wasn’t. It would take them years to actively consider the two years before they started talking radio silence and not just losing touch. Or more accurately, it would take until Ollie came back. 

Thea called Laurel for the first time since her awkward voicemail, but got no answer and couldn’t figure out a tactful way to say what she wanted to so didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to have such a heavy conversation over text though so she decided to wait for Laurel to call her.

When she did, three weeks later, she acted like nothing was different.

“Hey Thea here’s a would you rather for you: would you rather be robbed by a hoard of like goat lizards or stalked by a member of Insane Clown Posse?” Laurel said casually, as if the entire world hadn’t changed in the last month.

“Laurel. Hey. How are you?” Thea said.

“I’m fine, just trying to settle a bet. So like the goat lizards are tiny and loud and taking anything not nailed, but the member of the Insane Clown Posse is really gross looking and will not go away and also is kind of a perv.” 

“Um I guess the goat lizards,” Laurel laughed triumphantly but Thea ignored it. “Laurel really, I mean have you been watching the news?”

“Oh,” Laurel said slowly, “no I guess not. I’ve been pretty busy with…with the…goat…lizard…question? For…a social experiment.”

“Laurel,” Thea sighed. She was confused but she knew this needed to happen. “Oliver is alive.”

Laurel didn’t say anything.

“They…they found him on an island. He’s back home.”

She still didn’t say anything. It sounded like something heavy dropped somewhere in the background, then there was a distant siren.

“Laurel are you alright?”

“No. Shit. I gotta go. We can talk later about the-”

Then she’d hung up. Thea waited for over a weak to figure out what exactly about Oliver being alive again Laurel wanted to talk about. Was she going to ask how he was? Was she going to ask how Thea was? Was she going to ask if Sara was magically alive again too and would Thea have to be the one to tell her no?

When Laurel called back the answer was none of the above.

“I dunno, Thea. I mean I’m happy for you. I’m glad you’re happy. But I have a new life that doesn’t really involve Oliver. It involves you, sure, but just…not Oliver. I don’t think I really need closure at this point. If he asks you can tell him anything you want. Give him my number if you must. I mean I don’t answer the phone on the best of days but maybe I’ll shoot him a text back or something. I can’t promise it’ll be nice though, so uh, if you want me to be nice maybe don’t.”

-

Oliver did ask for Laurel’s number, just not from Thea. Tommy hadn’t gotten the “give him my number if you must but I’m not gonna be nice” message until after he’d thoroughly dissuaded Oliver from pretty much ever talking to her again. Kind of. Oliver mentioned her constantly in the months after his return, but Tommy did his best to change the subject. He never let on that he talked to her, but Thea had let it slip at some point so Oliver took a while to drop it.

It was suddenly strange for Tommy, to be friends with Laurel as a separate person from Oliver. He’d almost forgotten they dated, which was ridiculous because for so long they had been OllieandLaurel attached at the hip (or attached at the hip when Ollie wasn’t attached at the groin to another girl). 

That strange new dynamic took hold of Tommy for a while, while a different kind of strangeness was taking over for Thea. The kind of strangeness that wondered why the heck hadn’t Laurel known Oliver was back before Thea had to tell her?

And, not to sound too juvenile, but how could Laurel just be so over what happened? Oliver had been her everything, and his betrayal had been brutal. What kind of magical therapy could help Laurel just…move on? Or not move on, because she was clearly still angry about what happened. So just not care? What could be bigger or more important than Oliver’s return and the chance for some answers?

Besides all of that, weren’t lawyers supposed to be all about politics and the news circuit and stuff? How could Laurel just not know?

It wasn’t even just Oliver that made Laurel seem super weird to Thea.

-

“Yeah your dad really has it out for this Hood guy, did he tell you why?” Thea asked, after Roy let loose how important it was to him to find the Arrow and be trained by him.

“What Hood guy? Dad doesn't really talk shop with me,” Laurel said, and kernels of confusion continued to crowd Thea.

-

“Hey why haven’t you ever mentioned Gotham’s vigilante? The news just mentioned him as being like longer running but more covert than our Hood, is that his basic deal?” Thea asked, patching Roy up after some tough training and wondering if all vigilantes were this injury prone.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah he’s been around more but is definitely lower key. Just like that,” Laurel had replied

“Does he shoot arrows too?”

“Uuuuuh. Yeah?”

-

Only just when Thea was starting to get paranoid that Laurel wasn’t normal and happy and was instead just like everyone else in her life and lying to her, she showed up outside front door one morning.

“Hey Thea! Surprise!” Laurel looked like the sun, her hair lighter than Thea had ever seen it and her smile more radiant that she remembered.

Thea ran up to her and hugged her.

“What are you doing here?” Thea had mumbled into Laurel’s shoulder.

“My flight got rerouted,” Laurel had said simply.

“What?” Thea asked, because that didn’t make any sense.

“I mean my fight was cancelled. I was supposed to be go to Metropolis but my connection was cancelled and there weren’t any more until tomorrow night. There was one leaving to Starling a gate over from where was I was talking to a ticket agent so I decided hey let’s be spontaneous! I’ve still got to leave tomorrow, but I’ve got the whole day today to hang out if you want.”

“That’s so cool!”

“So I was thinking spa day, but I’m open to suggestions,” Laurel said, linking her arm with Thea’s as they walked toward Thea’s car.

“Oh you will never hear me complain about a spa day,” Thea said.

Between getting their nails done, and getting facials, getting massages, and finally relaxing in a sauna, Thea had talked about pretty much everything going on in her life. She hadn’t realized how much she was bottling up.

“It’s like I haven’t been able to go a week without something huge in my life going wrong. Oliver coming back was supposed be this great thing, but he and Mom started getting in these daily fights over nothing. Then Mom was arrested and Oliver was suddenly totally on her side and I was the bad guy for fighting with her. Now she’s out and Oliver won’t talk to her again!”

“Unfortunately, tragedy isn’t a pause button on life,” Laurel said, “in fact in my experience, whenever you think you just need everything to pause so you can deal with some complicated feelings, that’s when something else is going to go off the rails. Whatever tiny issues you guys are have on the back burner is probably just boiling over now that there’s bigger stressers.”

“How is anyone supposed to deal with crap feelings when everything goes wrong at once?”

“Emotional maturity is a beast,” Laurel said with a wry smile, “but if you can’t figure it out with all the stuff you’ve gone through than I’m not sure anyone can.”

“Well I like to think I’m dealing with it better than Oliver,” Thea said.

“No doubt you are. But you know what might help? An outlet. Just a way to channel your emotions into something that has nothing to do with whatever else is going on in your life.” Laurel started laughing as she finished, “Use your feelings to really create something!”

“You sound like a therapist,” Thea said laughing along with Laurel.

“I’m just very in tuned to the emotional spectrum,” Laurel laughed again.

By the end of the day Thea had a cute new haircut, glowing skin, zero muscle knots, and a new game plan on how to deal with her family drama. And no more suspicions about where Laurel had been for the last 5 years.

-

The short visit did the opposite for Tommy.

-

“Hey sorry I’m late,” Laurel said, running into the diner Tommy had picked out for their breakfast. 

“No problem, I already ordered you some chicken and waffles so you wouldn’t be late for you flight.”

“Oh my hero,” she said.

“So what was it like spending the night at your dad’s? Feel a little like a kid again?”

“I actually ended up staying at a friend’s last night. Dad got busy and had to cancel.”

“What?” Tommy asked. “You’re in town for 24 hours and he cancels dinner with you?”

“I mean we had breakfast when I first got in yesterday so. But I mean you’re right. I made it to his building before he called and for that 10 seconds it was some major deja vu.”

Tommy was a little flabbergast at Detective Lance and also a little at Laurel. She looked more closed off than hurt. But Tommy was kind of hurt too, I mean Laurel stayed with some friend last night that wasn’t him? Was it Thea? He didn't know of anyone else in town she still talked to. He was about to ask but Laurel spoke first.

“Has he been busy a lot lately?” she asked, “I mean I know you guys aren’t friends or anything, but anything weird going on in the news that could cause the police some backlogs?”

“I mean we kind of live in a hellhole, Laurel,” Tommy said. “So yeah I guess there’s no shortage of crime for him to clean up.”

“Even with a vigilante running around?” Laurel said. Then she rolled her eyes, and Tommy wondered how hard she’d be laughing if she knew who was under the green hood.

“Even with two vigilantes now,” Tommy said instead. He could talk about the new blonde in a mask without having to lie to Laurel, and it was pretty juicy gossip that no many people in town knew.

“Two, huh?”

“Rumor has it. A blonde woman in a mask.”

Laurel sighed just as a woman walked out of the kitchen holding Tommy’s breakfast burrito and Laurel’s waffles.

As they dug in Tommy tried to make the meal more cheerful.

“Ok here’s a hypothetical,” he mumbled around his burrito. “If you were a superhero, what would your gimmick be?”

“Can I have powers?” Laurel smiled.

“Nope. You’re just some maladjusted weirdo in a mask.”

Laurel hummed as she took a drink of water. She still didn’t have an answer when she set the glass down and started tapping her fingers around the glass. Tommy rolled his eyes at her show of seriousness and tried not to laugh each time her clunky ring clinked against the glass, marking time.

“Does it have to be in Starling? Or do I work where I live?” Laurel said.

“Oh wow I didn’t think you’d think so hard about this,” Tommy laughed.

“I don’t take my hypotheticals lightly, Tommy.”

“Fine, yes, you can be a caped crusader in Gotham. So what, bat-themed?”

“I’m actually moving to Metropolis,” Laurel said lightly, and Tommy clamped down any more hurt he might have about Laurel’s life being so unknown to him. “So in that spirit, I think I’d be space themed.”

“What does Metropolis have to do with space?”

Laurel laughed and Tommy tried not to feel like she was laughing at him. 

“Obviously I mean the Daily Planet,” she said, “I hear their reporters are out of this world.”

“Basically I’m hearing that you’ll be a pun-based hero and you know what, I support that.” Laurel was still laughing at herself and Tommy joined in. “And good for you for using your superhero identity to keep print media relevant. Really going the extra mile to be a good guy.”

“I just want to show that not every masked hero is a jackass,” Laurel said. “I know with your city’s heroes it’s hard to imagine, but I’m sure some heroes are like, decent people, who care about their community.”

“Wow shots fired at Starling City’s heroes,” Tommy said. Laurel might not have had dinner with her dad, but she was still talking to him enough to have his opinions about Oliver spread to her. Well, that or she somehow knew it was Oliver. Nah, Tommy though, she’d probably be more against the Arrow if she knew the truth.

“You know what I won’t stand for this,” Tommy said instead, “to prove that Starling has great heroes, I’m gonna become one.”

“Yeah,” Laurel said, “what’s your gimmick? Medieval murder?”

“No I’ll be a doctor.”

“A doctor themed vigilante?”

“A doctor themed vigilante,” Tommy nodded. “All help, no hurt.”

“You do your city proud, Tommy.”

-

A week after Laurel’s visit, Sara Lance came back from the dead.

“Weirdly timed party, Oliver,” Tommy said.

“I just wanted Sara to feel as welcome as possible as soon as possible. You did the same for me,” Oliver said, not exactly un-defensively. 

“I actually meant a week earlier and Laurel could have come.”

“What?” Oliver said.

“What?” Tommy said. 

“Why would Laurel have come?”

“She had a layover or something last week.” Oliver didn’t say anything, so Tommy continued, despite the slowly dawning realization that this was the first time he brought up Laurel to Oliver rather than the other way around. “She was in town all day.” Oliver’s face was getting blanker by the second. “She and Thea had a spa day.”

“I’ll be right back,” Oliver said, and Tommy suddenly felt like a huge asshole.

“Sorry, Thea,” Tommy said to himself. 

It kind of sucked that Oliver left to go berate his sister for not telling him Laurel was around, because Tommy had wanted to badger him more about Sara. Had she been on the island with him? Did he know she was alive this whole time?

Tommy spent so much time avoiding Oliver’s other life so that he could be unbiased emotional support for his friend, but now that the superhero life might be bleeding into the normal life Tommy was definitely beginning to regret that decision. He wondered if Diggle or Felicity knew. He scanned the room for either and started brainstorming non-suspicious ways to interrogate them.

He found them both hiding in a corner by a snack table and made a beeline.

Luckily for him though, any and all questions he had for the night got answered halfway through his walk.

“I know this wasn’t really what you wanted honey, but I’m glad it worked out this way,” Quentin Lance said to his youngest daughter.

“Yeah I,” Sara started, “it’s not as bad as I thought. Being back.”

Tommy stopped walking as casually as he could. He did a quick look around to see if there was anyone around he could pretend to be talking to and saw a group of his and Oliver’s college friends. He joined their circle and laughed along to whatever joke was just told but kept his ears firmly on the Lance’s.

“It’s nice to see your mother so happy,” Quentin said wistfully. “I’ve felt a little selfish; knowing you were okay but not telling her.”

“Don’t call yourself selfish, Dad,” Sara said with more hurt than Tommy had ever heard from her.

“I don’t mean it that way,” Quentin said quickly. “I just. I’m happy,” he said simply.

“I’m happy, too,” Sara said.

“And I’ve been unhappy for so long, it feels good to show it off a bit. Being happy.”

“Yeah, it’s,” Sara said again haltingly, “it’s nice.”

“I wish your sister were here, though.”

“She’s not ready to forgive me. Thats,” Sara paused, “that’s fine. Expected.”

“She was only just in town,” Quentin said. “She might not be able to get back soon,” Sara made a sound. Tommy couldn’t tell if it was to interrupt her dad or just because she was upset, but Quentin continued anyway. “But she will! It’s…you weren’t ready before. You will be when she comes back for her next visit.”

Tommy had to work to laugh along with the group he was hiding in, because he was very much not a happy camper right then. Quentin had known Sara was alive when Laurel was in town. He hadn’t told her then, but apparently he’d told her since.

But Tommy tried to think of how Quentin would even be able to tell her. Whatever Laurel’s new life entailed, it kept her busy because she never answered her phone. Hadn’t done it once since she left town over 5 years ago. She called him, that was it. Hell, she didn’t even text back right away most times. Laurel always got back to people who contacted her, but it always seemed to take a minute. Or, in the case of when she’d first left, 2 years.

So did Quentin leave a voicemail? 

“Hey honey. It’s Tuesday, around 1pm. You’re sister’s not dead, she’s alive and I’ve known for at least a week now. Call me back, either this number or my work phone. Bye.”

Or did he text?

“saras alive :). party 2nite. rsvp”

Neither seemed particularly tactful.

Quentin seemed sure Laurel would come running back once she did get the news though. As Tommy walked back toward the drink table he caught sight of Thea and Oliver and Moira arguing by the stairs. Then he remembered Oliver’s return. Not only had Laurel not come back into town for him, but it had actually taken her months to even hear about it.

How long would it take Laurel to hear about her sister? And god, this whole communication thing was ridiculous! How had he never noticed it before? What kind of job kept her off the grid like this? He didn’t know. How did he not know? He and Laurel had been talking for almost 4 years years, how did he not know what kind of job she had?

He knew she lived in Metropolis, and before that Gotham. He didn’t have her address for either though. Did Quentin? Were Sara and Quentin counting on Laurel to come running despite whatever absurdly busy job she had because they couldn’t just go visit her?

Tommy left the party early, too confused to even pretend to mingle anymore. Also it was pretty clearly getting shut down by Moira soon anyway.

-

Laurel didn’t come running to visit Sara when she finally heard she was alive.

She didn’t come running when Thea found out her dad wasn’t her dad.

She didn’t come running when Thea’s boyfriend confessed to being a vigilante murderer and had to leave town.

She didn’t come when Thea died and came back broken, when Oliver left town, left her, to live in the suburbs like he was ever a suburbs kind of guy even before the Gambit.

In fact Thea had tried to call Laurel when she and John were being overpowered by Ghosts. She was ready to tell Laurel everything about her dangerous new hobby if it meant having someone to be in her corner and actually help her not feel like she was drowning all the time.

And that call had been the last straw.

-

“Laurel,” Thea said through tears, “I need you to answer okay.” She waited as if she were leaving a message on a 90s answering machine instead of a cell phone voicemail. “I need you to call me back. I need to talk to you. I need you to visit or something. I just need you right now.” She let out a quiet sob. “Please.”

Laurel called back as soon as Thea hung up, and as relieved as she was a part of her was furious that Laurel had screened her call.

“What’s wrong, Thea?” Laurel said. Her voice was hoarse and the sounds around her were loud and overbearing.

“I died, Laurel,” Thea said without preamble. “I died a few months ago and came back but I’m so angry all of the time now. And I’m trying to use it for good. Trying to fight bad guys and protect my city but every day it gets harder not to just let loose on some creep and I’m scared I’m going to kill someone.”

It was hard to make out what Laurel said from the mashup of voices speaking in an unrecognizable language and mechanical beeping of what sounded suspiciously like hospital machines.

“Anger,” Laurel said weakly, and stopped. “Or wrath. Rage. It can eat you alive.”

“Laurel we need to talk,” said a voice on Laurel’s end of the call.

“It is eating me alive,” said Thea.

“Me, too,” said Laurel.

“Laurel, please,” said the man with Laurel.

“But at the end of the day it’s just a feeling. There are others. Fear, desire, hope, compassion, love. Willpower. They’re what can help you right now.”

“You’re what can help me right now,” Thea screamed. “I need a friend, Laurel, not a speech.”

“I can’t come,” Laurel said. “I can’t leave. Thea I’m sorry I think—”

Something loud happened happened on Laurel’s end and she was gone. Thea listened to voices yell, doors open and close, and those horrible hospital sounds beep and scream. 

Then the man that had been trying to talk to Laurel picked up the phone.

“This is Thea?” he asked.

“Who is this?” Thea said, “Where’s Laurel what happened?!”

“She’s going to call you back,” he said.

“Fuck you, what happened to her? Is she okay?”

“She will be, alright. She just—” he sighed. “She was hurt. But we have a plan. She’s going to be fine, and she’ll call you back soon.”

She didn’t.


	2. Investigation

Laurel eventually texted back. She said she had been in the hospital for appendicitis, was sorry, and moved on as if nothing had happened. According to Oliver, Laurel had her appendix taken out when she was 15.

So Thea called Tommy, the only other person she knew who still gave a damn about Laurel and might help Thea help Laurel with whatever mess she was in.

And when their investigation didn’t turn up any obvious answers, they called the cavalry.

-

Curtis wasn’t their first choice for top-secret-even-from-the-rest-of-the-team surveillance. But since Thea had a hard time trusting Felicity with sensitive information since her role in finding out about Thea’s parentage, and neither Thea nor Tommy knew Cisco Ramon very well, Curtis turned into pretty much their only choice.

“Alright and here’s a photo of her right side, too. This helps right? Having multiple angles for the computer to search against?” Tommy asked, handing over a forth picture of Laurel.

“Yeah, actually it does,” Curtis said as he typed. “I probably won’t need them though. Credit cards and public records should narrow it down enough. So how far back am I searching?”

Thea and Tommy looked at each other.

“8 years,” they said together.

Curtis stopped typing. 

“I’m sorry what?” he said.

“She went missing a little over 8 years ago,” Thea said. “We need to know how, and we need to know what’s been happening to her.”

“She’s been missing for 8 years?” Curtis said. “This girl? Detective Lance’s daughter?”

“Yes,” Tommy said.

“I did a preliminary search of her you know,” Curtis said. “As soon as you guys asked me to do this I did a surface check. There’s no missing person’s report.”

“No one but us knows she’s missing,” Tommy said.

“So Detective Lance doesn’t know his own daughter has been missing for 8 years?”

“He doesn’t realize it,” Thea said. “She calls on the phone, she answers texts. She even visited once. But something’s wrong alright. Someone’s keeping her away from us. I talked to him on the phone.”

“Okay I’m still gonna do this search for you guys, but I kinda feel I have to bring up the possibility that if she’s making calls and visiting she might not be missing. She might just by lying.”

Thea ground her teeth while Tommy sighed.

“Then we need to know that, too,” he said. “Just search everything. Find her.”

-

An hour after Curtis started his search he sent them away. He hadn’t found anything and their presence was making him antsy. They got dinner at the same diner Tommy took Laurel to the last time he’d seen her, talked their game plan, and went their separate ways to sleep for the night. 

Activity in Oliver’s hunt of Darhk took up the next day and a half, but around 3am when Thea was crawling back into her apartment she got a text from Cutis to meet at his office. She groaned the whole way there and met a sleepy eyed Tommy in his pajamas at the door.

“I changed my mind about finding Laurel,” he yawned. “She can wait until the morning.”

“No she can’t!” Curtis shouted as he slammed his door open. He was still wearing the same clothes Thea saw him in 2 days previous and she was getting a bad feeling about this.

“Alright so something is very rotten in the state of Denmark and it is all centered around your girl Friday.”

“What the hell,” Tommy whispered to himself. Thea took note of the empty coffee pot sitting right on the desk surrounded by crushed Red Bull cans and had to agree.

“Alright,” Curtis said, “first things first, money trail was a bust. One bank account opened in 1998, inactive for the past 8 years. Credit card: account opened in 2003, inactive for the past 8 years. Employment history last shows her working a YMCA in 2000, then a library in 2003. She quit the library, you guessed it, 8 years ago and hasn’t had anything on file since. School! She graduated Starling State in 2007, was accepted at Gotham College of Law that same year. She accepted, picked her classes, but was not present for orientation. That was, for anyone keeping track, 8 years ago.”

“She never went to Gotham Law?” Tommy asked. 

“NOPE!” Curtis said gleefully. “So I tried it your way, just put her face in some stolen facial recognition searches and go to town. I used a narrow search at first, right? Tried ID databases, newspapers, mugshots. Nothing but her California driver’s license which expired 6 years ago. ATM machines, airports, train stations: zilch, nada, nothing.”

“That can’t be right,” Thea interrupted. “She took a flight here 2 years ago.”

“No she did not. I also searched flight records, she is nowhere to be found. I forgot to mention it specifically because it’s impossible to book a flight these days without a credit card and she did not use hers. If she flew here, she didn’t use her name and she was spectacular at staying off cameras.

“So then I widened the search,” Curtis continued. “I worked very hard and did some very illegal things to search every,” he paused dramatically, “single,” another pause, “CC….TV….and—”

“Oh my god get on with it!” Thea said.

“—traffic cam I could get my hands on. Happy you spoil sport?” Curtis sighed and reached for a still upright can of Red Bull. It sloshed with he shook it and Thea and Tommy watched horrified as he chugged it.

“And you know what I found?” he asked when he was done. Tommy and Thea gave him blank looks. He giggled. “Nothing.”

“How is that good news?” Tommy asked.

“It’s not! It’s awful!”

“Why are you so happy about this?” Thea said.

“Because do you know how impossible it is to not be photographed? In this day and age?” Curtis jumped up to emphasize his point. “Here, for comparison’s sake,” he sat down and started typing very fast, “Oliver was presumed dead for 5 years, most of which he spent on a deserted island. Would you like to see how many pictures I can find of him during that time?” The side screens of his console flickered to life with dozens of pictures. “Look there’s Oliver crossing the street in Hong Kong. And Oliver in his own company’s building in Starling City in 2009, that’s weird. And there’s Oliver eating some street meat in Coast City.

“You know who else was pretending to be dead around this time? Sara! Let’s see what old Sara was up to.” More pictures flashed all over the screens. “Here we see Sara in Beijing. Sara in Riyadh, Sara in Paris. There’s Sara in Egypt, and Sara in Moscow. Sara is just all over the place.”

Curtis turned to look smugly at Thea and Tommy.

“That took me 10 seconds. I’ve been searching for Laurel for 2 days. BUT!” Thea and Tommy jumped as Curtis turned back around to frantically start typing again. “I was exaggerating just a little bit when I said I found nothing. I only found mostly nothing.” 

A single dozen set of photos appeared on the screens.

“Here you see the sum total of evidence that Laurel Lance exists: street camera shots of her from the visit you already mentioned she paid you in 2014. Plus, this picture.” He blew up one of the shots of Laurel. She was holding a pizza box outside a tall building, the time code said it was around 9pm.

“Would you like to know what is weird about this picture?” Curtis said, standing and gesturing dramatically at it. 

“Yes,” Thea said at the same that Tommy said, “Obviously.”

“It was taken in Metropolis.”

“We already told you she said she lives there,” Thea said shortly.

“Uh-uh-uh grouchy,” Curtis actually shook his finger at her. “It was taken February 5th.” He raised his eyebrows waiting for them to react somehow. Tommy didn’t, but Thea did.

“That’s not possible,” she said as she examined the photo closer. Curtis was bouncing on the balls of his feet next to her. “Laurel and I went to the spa that day. She had breakfast with Tommy the next morning. All of that was here, in Starling.”

“Exactly,” Curtis whispered. “A direct flight between Starling and Metropolis is 4 and a half hours, and that’s just time in the air. This picture was taken at 9pm, Central Time. That’s 7pm Pacific. Laurel left the spa with you at 5:30pm,” he pulled up a street camera showing them leaving the spa. “She bought pizza with cash at a Saul’s pizza around the corner from her dad’s apartment at 6pm,” another picture showed Laurel buying pizza in a dive-y restaurant. “And the next thing we know she’s in Metropolis less than an hour later holding the same pizza.” He pointed to the picture in question.

“What?” Tommy said, leaning forward to look at all the pictures.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Thea said.

“No,” Curtis laughed like only a man who’d had too much caffeine and not enough sleep can. “It doesn’t.”

“So what does it mean?” Tommy asked.

Curtis shrugged dramatically.

“Heck if I know,” he said. “But I did a little digging.” Thea thought she was kind not to snort and question his use of the word little. “And decided to widen the search even further by searching social media posts. A lot of tourists catch people and post them on Facebook or whatever. It’s not always helpful because not everyone timestamps their pictures but it’s something right. I again found nothing. At least when I did most angles of her face. But I found one partial match from the side.”

He brought up a screen grabbed tweet from the Daily Planet linking to an article about a gasoline explosion in El Paso, Texas. There was a picture attached showing mostly smoke covering the remnants of a high tech looking building with a small crowd of onlookers out front. Curtis pointed to one of them.

“That, I believe, is Laurel,” he said. It was hard to tell from the angle, but Thea could see the similarities.

“That’s also impossible again,” Tommy said, pointing to the date and time listed in the article’s blurb. It said the explosion happened February 5th at 6am. Laurel had showed up to Thea’s house at 10am after breakfast with her dad.

“Yes, but an impossible lead is still a lead when nothing about your case makes a lick of goddamn sense. And it certainly looked more like a lead when I remembered hey I already searched newspaper pictures so what gives. See this picture slipped through the crack because in the official story,” Curtis opened the article and showed the photo that accompanied it, “Laurel is cropped out. So I think, huh wonder who did that? This is it guys. This is why you’re here. Because this article was written by one Clark Kent. And do you know who happens to live in the Metropolis high rise Laurel brought pizza to? Clark Kent.”

“He knows something!” Tommy exclaimed.

“Maybe!” Curtis yelled right back. 

“What do you mean maybe?” Thea said. “He knows her, she knows him. He’s our lead. When can we get to him?”

“First off I needed to check with you, Thea, about him. Because the last time you talked to Laurel on the phone you heard some guy right?”

“Yes it must have been him,” she said.

“Again, maybe. Here listen to this, is this him?” Curtis brought up a clip of Clark Kent interviewing some politician. He was asking about spending and cooperation in that calm reporter-y voice you heard all over the news, but no matter how Thea listened she couldn’t hear it as the same voice she’d heard luring Laurel off the phone.

“No,” Thea said.

“Just because he wasn’t on the phone doesn’t mean he’s not connected. We have to find this guy, find out what he knows.”

“We could,” Curtis said in a voice that said he didn’t really want to do that. “Or I could show you what else I found.”

“There’s more?” Thea said hopefully. “Show us.”

“Right so I started wondering if anyone else in the photo meant something. Clark Kent took the picture, but Laurel wasn’t the only one cropped out of it. I couldn't identify all of them but of the ones I could I found: Ted Kord. He owned the lab that got destroyed. Jaime Reyes, local high school kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. And this man, Hal Jordan, a man who, in a coincident to beat all coincidences, was filed as missing 8 years ago.”

“What?” Thea asked.

“Yup. He was a test pilot flying out of Coast City when his plane just disappeared. They found a crash site, but no debris larger than a quarter and no sign of where he went. And before I tell you where the crash site was, I feel we should take a trip back in time to 8 years ago, the last time Laurel Lance used her credit card. It was for a camping permit down near Yosemite. Thank you for that trip down memory lane. Now would you like to guess where Hal Jordan’s plane crashed then disappeared from?”

“Yosemite,” Tommy said quietly.

“Ding ding, mother flipping ding,” Curtis said. He reached for a can of Red Bull, luckily all the ones he could find were empty.

“So now I need to check again with you Thea,” Curtis said, pulling up a video from the Ferris Air website with Hal Jordan talking about one of their crafts. “Is this the guy you talked to on the phone?”

Thea listened to him talk about fuel efficiency but in Thea’s head all she could hear was him calling Laurel’s name over the beeping of a heart monitor.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s him.”

“Yeah that’s what I thought,” Curtis said.

“So how do we find Jordan?” Tommy asked.

“I don’t know, but I kinda think there’s one more picture I should show you. You see after the El Paso explosion Laurel came to hang out with you guys. Hal, meanwhile, apparently went to check on his old boss at Ferris Air. Here’s him coming right in the main lobby.” They watched as Curtis scrolled through different pictures of Hal Jordan. “Here’s them leaving together and walking along the beach. And here’s where they both leave.”

Thea and Tommy leaned into the monitor unsure of what they were seeing. They looked at each other, then back at the picture, then at Curtis who shrugged unhelpfully.

The picture was in black and white and pretty grainy, but no one could think of anything they’d ever seen in their life that would look like that no matter the shitty resolution. Because in the middle of the shot of Carol Ferris and Hal Jordan walking hand in hand on a sunny beach in SoCal there was a shining 8ft tall tear in space. Carol had one leg through the hole, were it unmistakably disappeared into thin air, while Hal hovered a foot off the sand.

Suddenly the door flew open behind them and Diggle came running through. 

“There you are!” he said through his panting. “I’ve been looking all over for you guys. The Flash has an emergency, he needs everyone.”

“What’s going on?” Thea said, already grabbing her bow and arrow.

“He thinks he caught an alien!”


	3. Abduction

Laurel loved camping. She loved being outside, feeling the fresh air, being away from routine and shortcuts. She liked fishing and trapping and purposefully not bringing any matches so she could make the fires to cook her catches herself. Don’t get her wrong she liked cell phones and indoor plumbing too, but there was something relaxing about feeling completely detached from the world. Just flipping a switch pausing everything else.

Sara had hated it. Their parents would take them to up the mountains once a month or so and Sara would spend a few hours admiring the trees and rivers then get bored and want to go home. She got attacked by some wasps when she was about 12, and it was so bad they all had to rush to the hospital. After that the family camping trips stopped. Laurel was 15 at the time. Old enough, she thought, to go on her own, but her parents never let her spend the night so she settled for hiking.

Oliver had hated camping, too. Hating hiking even, so when they started dating she made the choice to spend her weekends with him at some swanky club, either night or country, rather than foraging for wild garlic. (Laurel tried not to notice the irony of abandoning a hobby that gave her a feeling of increased independence and self-reliance in favor of a boy).

So when Oliver and Sara died while doing their damnedest to destroy Laurel emotionally, she figured now was the time to put the world on pause and go camping again. For the first time in over 4 years. Alone.

She maybe should have given herself a bit of a learning curve, because a lot of this stuff was a harder than she remembered when her mom had been by her side to help out.

“Dammit,” she said to herself, throwing down her fishing rode. The line had snapped with her first catch, and she hadn’t been able to re-string a new one in the hour she was trying. She laid back down on the river bed, feeling mud start to seep into her shirt and hair. It made her feel a little better, actually. To get dirty and gross. She’d worked so hard for so long to look as polished as Oliver’s life was so she could fit in, and even after he died there were cameras and acquaintances all over the place “checking in” and she thought if she so much as cried in public there’d be some sort backlash.

Out here she may be hungry but at least her face could be as splotchy as she wanted and no one would give a damn.

The sky overhead was churning, so Laurel stood up to make sure her tent was nailed all the way down and any supplies she had outside could stand to get a little wet if a storm came. She was just starting to collect extra kindling for the fire when she heard a deafening roar from over head. She looked up dumbfounded as a fireball flew by and disappeared beyond the tree line. Then the earth shook as whatever it was crashed into the ground.

Laurel stood there unmoving for well over a minute before she heard a shout. They were coming from the same direction the fireball had gone. She took off running before she could think twice about it. The rangers told her there were only a handful of people out this weekend, and she hadn’t seen any of them since she started hiking to her campsite the night before. She’d picked a corner of the woods away from everyone else. Whoever was screaming wasn’t campers, they were from that fireball. A plane crash, she thought. A plane crashed and there were survivors and they needed help. As long as they didn’t want fish, Laurel was their best hope.

There was smoke sneaking through the trees and Laurel stopped just long enough to tear a piece of her shirt off, dip it in the nearby river, and hold it up to her nose before running in, heading whichever direction was hotter and smokier to find the crash site.

When she got there she could just barely make out the sight of a lumpy craft. She slowed down and shouted through her face mask.

“I’m here to help!” she shouted. “If you can hear me, call out!”

“Over here!” said someone from the wreckage. Laurel got closer, unable to make sense of the shape of the plane but focusing more on whoever was stuck inside.

“I can hear you,” Laurel called, “just make more noise so I can find you. Are you hurt?”

“I’m here. I’m not hurt I think.” Laurel gave the plane a test touch. It was warm, but not too hot to climb. She looked around, and realized that despite the smoke, there weren’t any open flames in the whole area. “I mean there’s a cut on my arm, and I think I feel some blood on my forehead, but I can feel my feet and my hands. I’m just pinned.”

Laurel made it up to where the man’s voice was coming from, realizing it was a small two seat cockpit, and there wasn’t any sort of passenger section. That didn’t make sense though, because the plane was enormous. There was more of it behind the cockpit, she just couldn't imagine how it was attached.

“Hi,” Laurel finally got eyes on the man. “I’m Laurel,” she said, grabbing her pocket knife and trying to see where his seat belt was so she could cut it off.

“I’m Hal,” he said. He smiled like they were meeting in line at coffee instead of in the wreckage of a plane. “Nice to meet you.”

“Can you move your feet?” she asked. She was cutting any part of the seat harness she could see, but some of the metal had bent down around his feet.

“Yeah,” Hal said. He started to pull himself up gently. Laurel grabbed under his armpits to help as best she could.

“Did you see anyone from the other plane?” he asked once his feet were visible and he was sitting dazed on top of the cock pit preparing to climb down to the ground. “Are they alright?”

“Other plane?” Laurel asked. She looked up. More of the smoke was clearing and she could finally see that there were two distinct crafts. Two kinds of metals, two paint jobs. “You crashed mid-air with another plane?”

“Yeah I’ve never heard of it happening either.” Hal chuckled.

“Is anyone over there?” Laurel yelled to the other craft. There wasn’t a visible cockpit like with Hal’s, it didn’t even seem to have windows. “If you can hear me bang on the walls, I’ll come get you!”

“What the hell even is that thing?” Hal asked, gingerly turning to look at it.

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like it but I’m not a pilot.”

“Well as someone who knows a lot about aircrafts, that thing is weird looking.”

“Let’s get you on the ground, then I’ll go check it out. See if anyone survived,” Laurel said.

She helped Hal climb down the side of his plane. It was actually in remarkably good shape. Halfway down though the other craft started groaning and clanging, and it shocked them both so much Laurel let go of her hold on Hal and he dropped the last 5 feet to the ground.

“Oh my god I’m so sorry!” Laurel said, jumping to land lightly next to him. He was on his back moaning. “Are you hurt?”

“I mean I was just in a multi aircraft collision so yes,” Hal mumbled. “But no a rough landing isn't gonna do more damage. I think they’re making that noise you asked for though.”

Laurel stood up and walked around to see the other plane, partially behind and partially on top of Hal’s plane. It was shaking.

“I don’t think that’s them clanging for help,” Laurel said slowly. “Let’s get you a little bit away.”

“Are you going to go in there?” Hal asked from the ground. He was trying to stand up but had only managed to get to sitting.

“Yeah,” Laurel said.

“Not alone you’re not.”

Laurel didn’t bother arguing as she helped Hal up and led him to the biggest, least damaged tree in the area to sit against. Once she got him down he wouldn’t be able to follow her anyway, or at least she thought so. Instead he just grabbed a tall branch from the ground and used it as a walking stick to follow her back to the big ugly ship.

“Let’s go,” he said. They walked to the ship searching for a way in.

“This looks like the door,” Hal said to a metal panel that looked the same to Laurel as all the rest.

“If you say so,” she said quietly. He probably couldn’t even hear her over the racket the other ship was still making. They could even hear deep guttural shouts from within now.

Hal traced the shape of the door with his hand, searching for some sort of handle or release. Then he kicked it.

“Here,” Laurel said, picking up a sharp piece of thick metal from Hal’s ship and a rock and handing them to him. He looked at her blankly, so she rolled her eyes and grabbed them back. She jammed the metal into the seems he had pointed out, and banged on the other side with the rock, wedging it in.

“You get locked out of your car a lot?” Hal teased.

“My sister does,” Laurel said. Then corrected herself: “Did.”

There was a gap big enough to see through into the ship now, so Laurel pressed her head up against it and called out.

“If anyone is in there, we’re—” She stopped herself once she could actually see what the inside of the ship looked like. Because what the hell.

“What the hell,” she said.

"What?” Hal asked. She stepped back and let him take a look inside.

“What the hell,” Hal said. “This is not an airplane of any sort. This is not…this doesn’t exist. Nothing like this exists.”

“Well it’s here,” Laurel said. “So what is it?” He turned to look at her just as the the loudest clang yet came from inside the ship. They both stepped away from the door in time for something hit it with unbelievable force and blast it open.

Laying on top of the now broken door was something very clearly not human. It was 8 feet tall and bight red. It tried to use its long arms to get up off the ground but one of them was visibly broken, showing Hal and Laurel strange blue bones.

“Stay down, pig,” said a voice from within the ship. “You need to be healthy for our trip back to Ysmault. My master will you burn you alive and feed your ashes to the rest of your green dogs, and then we will come back to this backwater planet and hurl it into the sun.”

“I will die at your hand,” the alien on the ground said. “But you will still die at mine.” Then he lifted his uninjured arm, and it shot a bright green light into the ship. There was a disturbing squishy crunch, the sound Laurel imagined a body might make when it was impaled, and then something red and shining shot out of the doorway and hit Laurel in the chest. She flew backwards, hearing Hal shout after her. When she landed she was on fire.

“The river!” she shouted at Hal, who was struggling to hobble over to her. “I need water!”

“What’s wrong?” he asked, rather dumbly Laurel thought.

“I’m on fire!” she screamed. He just looked at her.

“You’re not on fire,” he said. “What hit you?”

“Fire,” Laurel shouted again. She was on her back, trying to roll out the flames, but the burning feeling didn’t go away. Suddenly the world turned green and she was lifted off her feet.

She screamed wordlessly, and could just make out Hal shouting at the grounded alien.

“Let her go! What are you doing?!”

His hand was lifted in the air again, shooting green light at her. That’s what she was floating in, some sort of solid green light. She hit it with her hand, sure the fire would melt it or something. But it didn’t do anything, and moreover, Laurel didn't see any fire on her hand.

“She’s angry,” the alien said calmly. “The ring is taking advantage. I’m sorry I couldn’t save her the pain, but it can still be alright if she remains calm.”

Laurel didn’t know how she was supposed to stay calm. How this alien expected her to be calm when she was burning from invisible fire. When she had stumbled upon some sort of alien grudge match when all she wanted to do was have a little R&R in the woods. When her boyfriend decided she was replaceable, and her sister decided to help him do it. When they were both dead so everyone she knew thought she was a bad person for still being pissed at them for breaking her heart. When her mother decided Laurel wasn’t worth anything without her sister and left town, left Laurel alone with all her anger and sadness and anger and ANGER.

Every bad feeling she’d had the last few months came bubbling to the surface. She was furious. She had been burning to ash for so long and it was finally bursting out. Everything would be burning soon. She could make it all burn.

The green light surrounding her disappeared in a red flash, but Laurel didn’t fall to the ground. She floated in the air and looked around at the wreckage that had once been a peaceful national park and felt the fire build up in her, flowing toward her hands.

“Laurel!” Hal called out. “I don’t know what’s happening but I see the fire now!”

She turned to him furious. This guy. Making jokes when the world was clearly ending. She held up her hand, seeing red light surround it, build in her fist as she prepared to knock him on his feet when green light surrounded her again and pulled her to the ground. The red alien was crawling toward her as she struggled against her binds on the ground.

“Your name is Laurel?” he asked gently. “That’s a beautiful name. Mine is Abin Sur. It’s nice to meet you.”

Laurel screamed wordlessly, imagining his pointy ears on fire.

“I’m a Green Lantern,” he said. “We’re conduits for all the stubbornness in the universe, so you’ll understand me not wanting to just let you go off to destroy yourself. And you will. I’m sorry but you’ve been possessed by a red power ring. They’re magnets for anger. Are you very angry, Laurel?”

“Only at you!” she growled.

“Laurel what’s your favorite shape?” Laurel didn’t say anything, so he continued on his own. “My daughter’s favorite shape was always a heart. Can you imagine a heart right now?”

Laurel pulled restlessly at the glowing green something still holding her down. Then she glared up at Abin Sur and imagined a ripping his heart out of his chest and setting it on fire.

“Very good, Laurel,” he said. Then coughed up a little blood. Laurel looked down in disgust but then saw what he was even talking about. There was a glowing red human heart floating above her left hand, surrounded by glowing light fire. It wasn't the other fire, the real fire still dancing around her skin, but all made of light, like the light Abin Sur controlled.

Some of her blind rage was replaced by wonder. Had she made that?

“These woods look lovely, I’m sure there are lots of animals around. Do you have a favorite animal?”

Laurel stared at the flaming heart and concentrated. It morphed into a little song bird. A canary. The little light construct stretched its wings and flew overhead.

She watched it fly around, relaxing with each flap of its wings.

“What are you?” Hal whispered from her side. “What’s going on? What did you do to Laurel?”

“I’m a Green Lantern. I was trying to stop some Red Lanterns from doing any harm to your planet. I had captured them on my ship, but they escaped the brig. I’m afraid when our fight broke out we crashed into your own craft. I’m sorry for that. You saw one of them die, correct? His ring latched on to your friend. It can be disorienting to feel that much power when you don’t understand what it is.”

Laurel wanted to ask what the power was. What was it she could feel coursing through her veins, what had made her fly in the air, what was the fire. What was making that delicate little light bird fly above her head now. But she didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to open her mouth and hear another growl. She just wanted to keep looking at her songbird fly and remember how she’d felt that morning waking up in her tent to the birds singing outside.

“One of?” Hal asked. “There are more of those things?”

“Many,” Abin Sur nodded. “There are Lanterns all over the universe, of all colors from the emotional spectrum.”

“No,” Hal said. “You said there were more than that came here, to Earth.” He stood shakily, still using his branch. Laurel was quiet under her light bonds, and Abin Sur was mostly prone next to her, bleeding and using much of his energy on keeping her down in case her bird’s hypnotic spell stopped working.

Exactly on cue a small grey alien with too many arms flew out of the still open door of the ship and into Abin Sur, knocking him away from Laurel and Hal. Laurel was suddenly released and disoriented. Her bird had disappeared and she could feel the anger come back. She looked up and saw Abin Sur, face ruined with small cuts from his enemy’s many clawed little hands. The thing on top of him was quick and vicious. Abin Sur looked at Laurel, then at Hal limping toward him waving his stick at the small attacker, then his head leaned back and he looked at nothing.

“No!” Hal called. He smacked the grey alien with his branch and readied to do it again when he was shot back by something glowing green hitting him in the chest. He groaned on the ground next to Abin Sur’s body and Laurel stood up slowly to face grinning little grey beast.

He looked at her left hand, and held out one of his own. There was a ring on it, red with a little insignia on it.

Laurel looked down at her hand and saw a matching ring right on her ring finger.

“You’re welcome, rookie,” the alien said. “Looks like his ring chose a new bearer. You can have the honors this time.”

He gestured to Hal on the ground. He wasn’t writhing around like Laurel had when her ring had hit her, but he was as dazed and confused as he had been when Laurel first pulled him from the wreckage of his plane. That couldn’t have been more than an hour ago, she realized suddenly. One hour ago she was failing at catching fish, and now she had some sort of alien weapon fused to her hand and was being told to kill a man whose life she had only just saved.

She lifted her hand, watched the red glow envelop it, heard the grey thing laugh, and then flung the light or fire or whatever it was right at him. He flew back a dozen feet and landed on an overturned tree with a crunch.

Hal was looking at her with wide eyes. She thought he was going to scold her for killing an alien creature. But he was laying next to Abin Sur’s body. They'd known him for about 5 minutes, Laurel realized. Somehow it felt longer.

“There could be more of them,” Hal said. “That ship could be full of them.”

“I’ll take care of them,” Laurel said ominously, holding up her hand. Hal stood shakily. His makeshift cane had been broken when he whacked Abin Sur’s killer, so he glared at his aching body and closed his eyes. Laurel watched as he slowly lifted off the ground, surrounded by a green light.

“We’ll take care of them,” he said.

Laurel walked into the ship, Hal literally hovering behind her.

They had seen the first room through their peek-hole before Abin Sur had come flying through the door. There were screens and buttons all over the walls of the tiny room. When they had looked through before, there was alien writing on the screens, but looking at it now Laurel and Hal could read all the words. “Door release,” “Air control,” “Gravity bubble.” Across from the door to the outside was the body of a tall, lanky green alien straight out of the Area 51 conspiracy theories. They walked over his body and found themselves in a cockpit.

“Show yourselves!” Hal commanded. Immediately one of the computer screens came to life and a calming voice called out.

“Onboard computer, present.”

Hal looked at Laurel as though asking for advice. She shrugged.

“How many people are on this ship?” Hal said.

“Two.”

“Where are they!”

“In the main command deck.”

Hal and Laurel panicked and scoured the room for tiny grey aliens with too many claws, searching under consoles and behind chairs.

“Where!?” Hal shouted at the computer. “Where are the Red Lanterns?!”

“There is one Red Lantern on board,” the computer said. “She is located by the food storage.”

Laurel, who had been opening random cabinets in search for dangerous aliens and shoving dehydrated food bags out of the way, stopped immediately.

“Computer,” she said, “How many living creatures are on this ship?”

“Two.” It said again.

“Uh-huh, and where are they?”

“In the main command deck.”

“Right, and who are they?”

The computer was silent.

“What are your names?” It asked instead of answering.

“Hal Jordan and Laurel…” Hal trailed off.

“Lance.” Laurel supplied for him.

“The two lifeforms on this ship are Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Red Lantern Laurel…” the computer paused, “Lance.”

Laurel slammed the cabinets shut dramatically and sat down in the nearest chair.

“Ok,” Laurel said. “No more invading aliens.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Hal said. “That means we can just, pack up and go home?” It was more of a question, for which the computer felt compelled to answer.

“Command accepted,” it said, “Packing up and returning home.”

The door to the airlock slammed shut since the door to the outside was unattached, and the whole ship shuddered. Hal and Laurel looked at each other with twin looks of panic on their faces.

“Uh,” Laurel said smartly, “Delay that command, computer!”

“Green Lantern vessels do not take voice commands from Red Lanterns,” the computer said.

“Computer!” Hal shouted. “Do not leave Earth!”

It didn’t answer right away, so Hal and Laurel listened to the shaking hoping it would stop on its own.

“To land on an underdeveloped planet requires override authorization,” the computer said. “What is the verification code?”

“You have got to be kidding me!” Laurel shouted. “We aren’t landing, we haven’t even taken off yet. Stop, doing whatever you’re doing and open the door!”

“Green Lantern vessels do not take voice commands —”

“For the love of god open the damn door!” Hal yelled.

“What is the verification code?” It asked again.

“Forget this,” Laurel said. She held up her hand and concentrated on making a crow bar. It formed slowly, but when she had it she gripped it tight and headed to the door. Before she could crack it open the ship shifted and she was thrown off her feet. Hal, still hovering because his legs wouldn’t support him, followed her lead and tried to pry the door open himself.

“Opening doors while in flight is not advised,” the computer said when Hal’s green crow bar slammed into the door.

“Then stop flying!” Hal shouted.

“What is the verification code to land on an underdeveloped planet?”

“We’re from that underdeveloped planet you idiot!” Laurel yelled, starting to hover herself.

“I am an advanced intelligent computer capable of calculating—”

“You’re a broken piece of shit!” Laurel shouted. She floated over to Hal, who was having trouble even finding a loose bit from the door to pry the crow bar into.

The computer didn’t respond right away, but Laurel and Hal could hear the engine revving up an knew it wasn’t rethinking putting them back on their own planet.

“I have run a diagnostic,” the computer finally said. “I believe there was some damage done to my central processing core. Was this vessel involved in a crash?”

“I can’t believe of all the ways a computer could kill us,” Hal grunted, “we get the death by incompetence.”

“The ship’s stabilizers are also damaged,” the computer said. “This ship will not survive leaving the atmosphere in one piece.”

“Then don’t leave the atmosphere!” Hal commanded.

“What is the verification—”

“We are going to die, Computer!” Laurel shouted. “Do you want us to die?”

“The leader of the Red Lantern Corps has commanded all Red Lanterns to kill Green Lantern’s on sight,” it said. “In kind the Green Lantern Corps has deemed Red Lantern life a low priority for protection. I am not programmed to care for your life or your death.”

“What piece of the ship is most likely to survive leaving the atmosphere?” Hal said, finally abandoning the door as they could feel the ship actually fly higher in the air.

“The holding cell has maintained most of its structural integrity,” the computer said.

“Where’s the holding cell?” Hal asked, grabbing Laurel’s arm.

A string of green lights lit up down one hallway, and Hal pulled Laurel along to it. Prisons, it turned out, looked pretty much the same no matter the planet of origin. The holding cells were two little cubbies, their doors busted open from the escaping Red Lanterns, just big enough to store a small cot and a toilet. They were part of a larger room with its own food storage area and a screen for the computer to interface with. The door to the rest of the ship was thick and likely strong enough to count as an exterior door when the rest of the ship tore itself apart.

“Air lock the whole wing, computer!” Hal said. The door shut behind them.

“You want us to be locked in a prison in space?” Laurel asked incredulously.

“If we’re being dragged against our will, I’d rather be able to survive so I can find a way back to Earth than burn to a crisp in the atmosphere."

The ship gave more rattles, something clanging loudly against one of the walls, as Laurel and Hal awaited their fate.

“What is that sound,” Laurel asked uneasily.

The small screen lit up with must be the view from outside. The computer had taken “pack up and go home” more literally than they’d initially thought. Trailing along behind them was Hal’s ship, and Abin Sur and his killer’s bodies, or whatever was left of them after flying through the air at breakneck speed. Laurel turned away in disgust.

The shuddering of the ship got worse with each passing moment. Hal grabbed Laurel’s hand when he felt them start to enter the atmosphere. They could feel pieces of the ship tear off with each passing moment and could see the pieces float by the camera still feeding into the computer’s prison screen. The last thing to fall apart was Hal’s own plane. He watched it fall off the cord tethering it to the ship and splinter off into rubble in silence.

The shaking stopped. The sounds stopped. And everything was completely quiet.

“So what now?” Laurel whispered.

“The detention wing is equipped with thrusters and life support in the case of an emergency. We are still on route to Oa. Estimated time of arrival, using the local time scale: 18 months.”


	4. Interrogation

Thea couldn’t stop thinking about Laurel for the whole drive to Central City. Laurel and whatever mysteries came with her. Mysteries of where she was hiding, of what Hal Jordan and Clark Kent had to do with her. Mysteries of what the hell that thing in the picture of Hal even was.

That mystery, if she allowed herself to be optimistic, might actually be answered soon. Because, well, aliens knew about worm holes or whatever, right? Yeah. If Barry found an alien, maybe Thea could get it alone for a second, show it the picture of Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris stepping into nothingness, and it would conveniently speak in English something like, “ah yes that is a worm hole, it sometimes takes young women while they’re camping and allows them to text their friends so they don’t worry but otherwise doesn’t let them leave.”

She hit her head against the head rest to stop her train of thought. She’d ask the potential alien being detained at Star Labs what it knew about abductions in the general sense. Because that’s why Barry had asked all of Team Arrow: he was worried about the whole Earth and wanted back-up. And if the Earth was in trouble, Laurel had to be put on the back burner. She’d been missing for 8 years, Thea reminded herself, she could stand to wait until they knew there wasn’t going to be some massive alien invasion.

When their van full of vigilantes pulled up to Star Labs and all got out like some sort of justice-fueled clown car, Thea tried not to run ahead. Oliver was in the lead, as the de facto leader of the team. Oliver was the one that knew Barry best, and Diggle and Lyla were right behind him because if something that effected the whole Earth was going down Argus would need to be involved. Thea could wait to badger the alien until both of them got their hands on him first.

_I can wait to badger the alien until Ollie and John talk to it first_ , she said to herself again. Because her gait had sped up without her permission. _I can wait._

Her phone buzzed, reminding her that Tommy as back in Star City waiting for Thea to give him any news. Curtis came along, but Tommy didn’t know anyone from Team Flash and mostly wanted to keep it that way. He was a dedicated civilian, he said whenever someone knew joined the fray on the streets. She ignored it, though. Because she was waiting.

“So what happened?” Oliver asked Barry and Cisco, leading them all through the many hallways of the abandoned science lab.

“We use this airstrip just outside of town sometimes for training,” Barry said, “so there’s a bunch of equipment stashed there. Cisco left some security sensor’s on them just in case someone came by and this morning they all went haywire. Wally and I went to check it out while Caitlin and Cisco stayed at the lab. Turns out just a little bit before this guy attacked there was some atmospheric activity like nothing they’ve ever seen before. Dr. Stein is looking at it now.”

They all passed by the main cortex, and could see Rip Hunter’s merry band of misfits standing around watching Stein and Jax examine some screens. Sara was sitting on a table swinging her legs watching Rip pace restlessly around the room. Thea slowed down, debating whether or not to pull her aside at some point to tell her about the secret search for Laurel. They hadn’t told Oliver because Laurel had made no secret about her desire to keep him out of her life, and well kidnapped or not Thea and Tommy wanted to respect that. Sara might be in that same box for Laurel, but maybe not.

_When I have more to go on_ , Thea promised herself.

Curtis suddenly gripped her arm and started shaking it so Thea tried to listen to the conversation at hand like a good vigilante.

“She’s unconscious, so we’ll just have to ask her when she wakes up,” Barry said.

“Sorry,” said Thea, “who? I thought there was just one alien?”

“There was a woman with him,” Cisco said. “Human. She was injured when we got there, unconscious and covered with some kind of electrical burns. The alien has them too, but he’s awake. Caitlin’s staying with Carol until she wakes up.”

Thea almost tripped.

“Carol?” She asked. Cisco was putting in codes to get through the doors into the pipeline but nodded absentmindedly.

“Yeah, Carol Ferris. She’s the old owner of the airstrip. Don’t know what the alien wants with her or why they were there, but we at least know who she is.”

“She’s been missing for about 2 years right?” Thea asked, and gave Curtis a significant look. “Do we think this thing took her?”

Oliver gave her a questioning look, but he didn’t look nearly as confused as Cisco and Barry.

“She hasn’t been missing,” Barry said. “At least not according to any reports I’ve seen.”

“She was at a conference a month or two ago,” Cisco said. “One of her pilots went missing a few years ago though, did you mean him?”

Everyone was looking at Thea so she laughed awkwardly.

“Yeah, that must be who I mean. Yeah Hal Jordan right? Sorry, silly me.”

Her heart was racing as they all neared the cells in the pipeline far away from all the metas. Barry clearly didn’t want to put them in danger of some sort of extra-terrestrial threat. An extra-terrestrial threat that she was now undoubtedly sure was connected to Laurel’s disappearance.

They arrived at the cell with Thea feeling furious at this creature. As soon as she saw him though, she had a split second of doubt. He had blueish grey skin with thick black lines that looked almost painted on around his eyes and chin. His body was mostly human-shaped, but just on the side of too long and lanky so they gave an Uncanny Valley feel. Thea could see the electrical burns Cisco mentioned on his right arm, deeper by his hand and fading as it went up to sneak under his shirt and peek out on his neck. It looked painful.

He was sitting on the floor too, ignoring the bunk next to him. His arms rested on his knees and his head hung low; he looked sad and tired and hurt. Thea kind of wish he’d snarl or something. But when they approached he just looked up, took note of them all and let his head fall back against the wall with a heavy thud.

“Has he been able to communicate at all?” Diggle asked.

“He talks alright,” Barry said. “Even knows a few words in English. But it’s mostly gibberish. He said a lot in his own language at first, but he’s been quiet for a few hours now.”

“Can you understand me?” Diggle said loudly.

“No,” the alien said immediately.

“How’d you answer if you don’t understand?” Oliver demanded.

“No,” the alien said again.

“Yeah,” Cisco said. “We tried that too. He might not even want to talk, though, so here, let me. We kind of have a rapport.”

“Hey buddy,” Cisco walked up to the window and pulled out a bag of vending machine cookies from his pocket. “Do you want this?”

The alien actually rolled its eyes.

“Yes,” he said. Cisco put the bag in the slot for food. The alien stood slowly to grab it from his end. He leaned casually against the wall as he ate and looked expectantly at their group.

“What are you?” Diggle demanded.

“Lantern,” the alien said.

“What’s your name?” said Diggle.

“Razer,” the alien said.

“That’s not ominous at all,” Cisco muttered.

“Why are you here?”

The alien, Razer apparently, was silent for a minute as he chewed a cookie and looked contemplatively at them. That might have been a bit outside of his understanding, because he did the most human-looking thing Thea could think of. He sighed and flopped back down on the ground to sit back against the wall.

“No,” he said sadly. He held up his hand, the one with the worst of his burns, and looked at it. He gestured at them with it almost hopefully and said, “Lantern?” again.

“Maybe lantern’s not his species,” Curtis said. Thea almost felt proud. Barry and his team made him nervous and his usual way of putting on a professional front was staying quiet and only nodding occasionally. “Maybe he’s just really hurt and needs medical attention like Carol.”

Razor perked up suddenly.

“Carol?” he said. “Where’s Carol?”

Diggle, Oliver, and Barry seemed to communicate telepathically as they decided their battle plan from there.

“What do you want with Carol Ferris?” Oliver asked.

“Lantern,” Razer said.

“Did you abduct Carol Ferris?” Oliver said.

“No,” he said. “Lantern!” He stood and put his hand up at them all, showing off the clunky ring he wore on one finger. “Laaaaaant-eeeeeern” He said slowly.

“Okay what does he think lantern means?” Cisco asked the room at large. “Because I have no idea what he’s getting at.” Razer groaned.

“Red Lantern,” he said pointing to himself. Then he flapped his arm to gesture behind their group. “Carol, Star Sapphire. Violet Lantern.” He looked expectantly at them, then shook his ring in their face again. When they didn’t react he fell back onto his cot and covered his eyes.

“I’m too old for this shit,” he said, and Thea wasn’t the only one taken aback.

“What kind of alien quotes Lethal Weapon?” Cisco asked. “He just quoted Lethal Weapon, right? I didn’t just imagine that?”

“Hey guys,” Caitlin’s voice rang out from the com against the wall. “Carol just woke up. She’s, uh, she’s asking where Razer is? Is Razer the alien?”


	5. Expedition

So here’s the thing about spending 18 months in a detention cell with a virtual stranger.

You have a lot of time.

I mean. A lot of time.

You have so much time that eventually you will have enough time to calculate exactly how much time has passed in different increments.

For example: 18 months was actually 540 days. 540 days was 12960 hours. 12960 hours was 777600 minutes. 777600 minutes was 46656000 seconds.

After a week Hal had beat the record for most time Laurel had ever spent uninterrupted with one person. After a month she started wondering if it counted as more time spent with friends she’d known for years if she was going purely by hours. She decided it probably did.

Because Sara had been 19 when she died, that’s how long Laurel knew her. 19 years was 6935 days. 6935 days was 166440 hours. but if you took out all the time they each spent apart in school (20160 hours) and the time spent at after school clubs (5040) or apart from each other with other friends (roughly 14820) or even just alone in their rooms not talking to each other (close to 20805), that really only came out to 105615 hours. 105615 was more than 12960, but honestly not by much if you also calculated intensity of interactions and used that as a variable. But maybe 46656000 seconds in a space prison wasn’t quite enough time to try to put a number on emotional depth.

The other thing about spending 18 months in a detention cell with a virtual stranger was that in most countries it was considered torture. With good reason.

-

Day 1:

“Ok so how do we turn the ship around,” Laurel asked Hal and definitely not the stupid computer that had locked them up in this place in the first place.

“The detention cell does not have clearance for navigation control,” the computer answered, because it was an asshole.

Laurel and Hal both glared at the screen. Hal took a deep breath and turned back to Laurel with a perfectly calm expression on his face.

“If we’re just floating, gravity will spiral us back to Earth eventually. Who knows where we’ll land, but it’ll be Earth and that’s a sight better than where we are now.”

“Great,” Laurel said. “We can wait it out for what, a few hours?”

“It will take one half rotation of the planet to be pulled close enough to fall through the atmosphere. Then 4 and a half minutes to land on the surface.”

“Great!” Laurel smiled. “We’ll be home in no time.”

“We will reach Oan space in 18 months,” the computer said.

“But we’re not headed to Oa or whatever your home planet is called,” Hal said. “We don’t have navigation.”

“The detention cell is fully outfitted with an engine, thrusters, and navigation in case of an emergency. We will reach Oan space in 18 months.”

“No,” Laurel said slowly. “You said the detention cells didn’t have navigation.”

“The detention cell does not have clearance for navigation control. The on board computer is used for all navigation in the detention cell.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Hal muttered into his hand.

-

Day 13:

“Favorite color?” Laurel asked.

“Not green, I can tell you that,” Hal said. “Favorite food?”

“Chicken and waffles. Favorite class in school?”

“Physics. How are chicken and waffles your favorite food if you’re from California?”

“I was actually born in Gotham,” Laurel said.

“That’s still not the first place I’d think of when I think chicken and waffles.”

Laurel shrugged.

“I dunno what to tell you man, I just like chicken and waffles. What’s your favorite food.”

“Shepherd’s pie.”

“You ever been to England?”

“Nope.”

“Hypocrite.”

-

Day 25:

“What if they’re hostile?” Laurel said.

“What if who’s hostile?” came the mumble from Hal from where he was lying underneath her bunk. Because he didn’t respect the sanctity of picking out their own cells and sticking with them and was always in her space. Which was fine. Really.

“The Oans or whatever. What if where ever we land is full of a bunch of hostile aliens that kill us immediately?”

“Abin Sur was an Oan. He wasn’t hostile. I mean I don’t think. He was less hostile than the other guys.”

“Green Lantern Abin Sur was from the planet Ungara,” said douchebag computer.

“Then why is home Oa?” Laurel asked.

“Oa is the headquarters for the Green Lantern Corps.”

“Are they hostile?” Hal asked, crawling out from under Laurel’s bed.

“The Green Lanterns are protectors of the universe, led by the Guardians of the Universe.”

“Redundant, but see? We’ll be safe and they’ll send us home,” Hal said.

“Red Lantern Laurel Lance is a Red Lantern,” the computer said. “She will be taken into custody and questioned about Red Lantern crimes.”

Hal and Laurel looked at the screen for a long moment, thinking not for the first time about creating a hammer and smashing the damn thing to pieces.

“I used to take a bunch of martial arts classes as a kid,” Laurel said. “Karate, then Judo, then boxing.”

“You want to practice?”

“Yeah just in case.”

“Just in case.”

-

Day 78:

“I think I mixed something that tastes like Shepherd’s pie!” Hal said from the tiny kitchen area. Or no, he called out as if they were in a normal house with actual walls and hallways. Which they weren’t. They were in a detention cell. He was literally less than 5 feet away from her, yelling around like an idiot.

“No,” growled Laurel, trying to pull her pillow over her head.

“Come on,” Hal said, “it’s not half bad.”

“It’s made of weird dehydrated alien powder like everything else we eat,” said Laurel. “It’ll taste like garbage. Everything always tastes like garbage.”

“We’ll that’s rude.” Hal took a single step and was in the misshapen doorway to Laurel’s cubby.

“Stay out of my room,” Laurel said, also like they lived in a normal house with actual walls and hallways instead of a detention cell.

“Well then give me back my pillow if you’re going to be all territorial.”

“You’re not even sleeping.”

“Maybe I want to!”

Laurel threw his pillow in his face, then kicked out at his knee caps. He went crumbling to the ground.

“Attention prisoners!” the computer called out. “No violence allowed in the detention cells!”

Laurel conjured up two shapeless beams of hard light on either arm, flew up in the air, and launched herself at the computer screen, ripping it to shreds.

“Attention prisoners!” the computer said, because it was programmed into the ship itself not the screen, “destruction of Green Lantern property is not allowed. This will be added to the charges against the entire Red Lantern Corps.”

-

Day 100:

“And there’s a flashback, and it looks all old and pixilated like a VHS. All the kids are getting in a car, but George Sr. stops baby Michael. ‘No no no,’ he says. ‘There’s no ice cream in the car.’ But Michael says ‘I’ll be careful.’ And then we see George driving around a corner. ‘Careful, Michael,’ he says. And then we see Michael sitting between Lindsay and Gob in the backseat, like totally covered in those seat covers you see in public toilets. And he’s holding an ice cream cone. I think it’s vanilla? No, it’s chocolate. And he’s like trying to lick it but the car keeps jerking, but then they go over a speed bump and the scoop flies off the cone and lands on the ceiling of the car.”

“No!” gasped Laurel.

“YES!” Hal said. “And back in the present Kitty is all ‘Whatever you think. But I did see Gob driving it last week.’ And of course Michael was furious so he said, ‘Honestly? Gob’s driving the car?!’ and Kitty just holds her files all demurely in front of her and says, ‘I’m not the liar.’”

Laurel cackled and rolled around on the floor while Hal sat on the bed, making light constructs of the scene for her.

-

Day 307:

Laurel rolled out of bed and planned to float over to the “kitchen” for some “coffee” but landed hard on her hip instead.

“Omph!”

“Y’alright?” Hal said, still in bed.

“I think I forgot how to fly.”

Hal laughed and came hovering over to her. Laurel tried to push herself up to greet him, but her powers weren’t responding. Instead she rolled over to lay on her back and stare up at him.

“If I don’t have magic powers anymore, do you think the Guardians will still arrest me?”

“They’re not going to arrest you no matter what,” Hal said, lowering himself down to set next to her on the ground. “Not if I can help it.”

“I gotta say, I’m still mighty angry for someone who’s anger power just crapped out on them. Mostly about how my power crapped out on me but I’m still sure I’ll be arrested by aliens as soon as we land.”

Hal didn’t respond right away. He reached down to pick up Laurel’s hand and hold it up, looking at her ring. It wasn’t glowing like it usually did. Like his was.

“How important do you think this is?” Hal asked.

“I mean I could literally die without it as soon as we reach Oa, so I’d say kinda a little.”

Hal sighed, and Laurel patted him encouragingly on the shoulder.

“Computer,” Hal said, “you can un-mute yourself.”

“Thank you, Green Lantern Hal Jordan,” it said for the first time in months. It had been so pleasant once Hal learned he could shut the broken piece of machinery up.

“Why did Laurel’s ring stop working?”

“Power rings are charged by the wearer’s lantern, which is linked directly to the cosmic entity that embodies each emotion. Has Red Lantern Laurel Lance charged her ring lately?”

“What?” Laurel said.

“I don’t think we have any lanterns,” Hal said.

“Um, we’re Lanterns, genius,” Laurel said.

“No like lanterns to charge our rings” Hal said. “Weren’t you listening to the stupid tin can?”

“It was just saying a bunch of gibberish.”

“I was speaking in Ungaran, the native language of Abin Sur, as I have since you arrived on board. Red Lantern Laurel Lance’s ring is currently nonfunctioning, and cannot translate for her as it used to,” the computer said.

“Our rings translate for us,” Hal said.

“I think I’ll like the computer a lot more now that I can’t understand it,” Laurel mused.

“I can speak in the Earthen language English if you prefer,” the computer said in English.

“Shut up, computer,” Laurel said.

“Green Lantern vessels do not take voice commands from Red Lanterns,” the computer said.

“Why does this thing answer every question I have but never listen when I tell it to do things?” Laurel asked Hal, knowing full well the stupid machine would answer anyway.

“General knowledge is free to all life forms. But access to Green Lantern intelligence and technology is to be kept from the enemy at—”

“Shut up, computer,” Hal said tiredly.

-

Day 311:

“Omph!”

Laurel woke up but refused to open her eyes.

“Y’alright?” she asked over to Hal’s cubby.

“My power ring just died,” he said, but muffled as if he wasn’t turning his head up from the floor.

“Looks like neither of us are gonna fight our way off Oa,” Laurel sighed.

-

Day 540:

They could feel the ship enter a planet’s atmosphere. It had only happened one time before, exactly 18 months ago, it wasn’t something one just forgot. They were sitting next to each other on Hal’s bed, as it was the one furthest from the airlock door.

Laurel reached for Hal’s hand, and he looked as reassuringly at her as he could muster. They would land today. For better or for worse, they would land on Oa. The planet claimed to house the Guardians of the Universe, but Hal and Laurel didn’t know what that meant for them. Hal was, technically, one of them. But they’d both spent 18 months hearing about how much Laurel wasn’t. How Laurel would be arrested upon arrival and questioned about the actions of people she’d never met before. They didn’t know if anyone would take Hal’s word that she was good, that she was a friend, that the only other Red Lantern Laurel had met she had killed in the name of avenging a Green Lantern.

The computer would be no help, as its memory unit was badly damaged. It was the thing that put them in this place in the first place: some damage to its logic and memory had effectively ruined Hal and Laurel’s life, and Hal didn’t want to put too much faith in their soon-to-be captors checking its system to search for proof that Laurel didn’t deserve to be treated like a criminal.

If they came for Laurel, Hal knew he would make them come for him, too. She was his friend. His best friend. His only friend for well over a year. She was his everything at this point. He had wanted to kill her multiple times during their imprisonment, but far more times than that he had been sure he would have died without her. He loved her more than he loved himself. It wasn’t even so much as love as it was some kind of connection that went bone deep. Maybe their brains had melted together after so much time alone, who knew. They were a team. Partners. Two pieces of a single coin.

The ship didn’t plummet as it entered the atmosphere. It started floating gently, a sensation Hal recognized from when his ring had still worked and he could fly. Someone was using a power ring to carry their ship gently down onto the surface of the planet. Good thing, too, because he wasn’t sure he could survive another crash.

He squeezed tighter on Laurel’s hand as the ship touched the ground and they could feel real gravity take over. As one, they stood and put their backs to the wall, facing the door. They would face whatever was coming head on. They couldn’t fight, not really. Countless hours practicing every kind of fighting either knew in their cramped little space would only go so far against the kind of power they knew they would face on Oa. But they’d still hold their heads up high. And stay together.

They stood there waiting for the door to open a long time, but when it finally did they were still blind-sighted. Quite literally. They’d been in the dark too long, Hal belatedly realized. Any natural sunlight, or hell any light brighter than the dim light in a prison cell, was going to be too much. They winced, each bringing their free hand to cover their eyes. They didn’t let go of each others hand though, they couldn’t. They would stay together.

Just as quickly as they sun had blinded them did they realize they didn’t have any air. Hal collapsed, clutching Laurel’s hand so hard she fell down with him. They gasped on the ground, hearing in some distant part of their minds footsteps come aboard and stand in front of them.

“Earthens,” someone said. “The ship has depressurized. They must not be getting enough oxygen.”

“They have rings,” said another voice. “Why aren’t they creating their own atmosphere?”

“Looks like they’ve been here a while,” yet another voice chimed in. Hal wondered how so many people could even fit inside their tiny ship. Unless they were the size of Abin Sur’s killer. “Their rings must need charging.”

Suddenly Hal could breath. He took a big gulp of air and felt himself being raised off the ground. He realized he wasn’t holding Laurel’s hand any more and desperately looked back at her. She was in a green bubble, same as him, gasping and looking right back at him.

“Welcome to Oa,” said the enormous orange alien with tusks holding him up. “Let’s get you to the hospital.” He turned to look at the others in the cabin with them. “Take the Red to the prison.”

“No!” Hal said. He tried scratching against the light holding him back, tried to claw his way back to Laurel.

“Don’t you worry little Earthen,” the alien said. “We’re friends. You’re a Green Lantern now. You’re planet might not know about us, but trust me, we’re the good guys.”

“Don’t take Laurel away!” he shouted.

“Red Lanterns are bad news, buddy,” his captor said. “You were lucky to survive the trip with one, especially with broken cell doors.”

“She’s my friend!” Hal realized tears were streaming down his face. He couldn’t see Laurel any more. He couldn’t see her! How long had it been since he’d not been able to see her? “She’s not bad, she’s not dangerous! Please don’t hurt her!”

“We’re just gonna question her,” the alien said, sounding incredibly unsure of himself.

“She doesn’t know anything! She’s been on that ship with me the whole time she’s had that stupid ring!”

They had stopped. Thank god they had stopped. The alien looked at Hal and Hal hoped he looked pathetic enough to want to help but assuring enough to trust.

“Kilowog,” said a new voice. The orange alien turned and went down to a low bow. Hal followed his gaze and saw a tiny blue alien with a huge head floating toward them. “Bring our new friend to the hospital wing, and then get a barrack set up for him.”

“Of course, Guardian,” the orange alien said. “It’s just…the Red Lantern that came with him—”

“Is being taken care of,” the tiny Guardian said.

Hal wanted Kilowog to argue, to say he trusted Hal and didn’t think Laurel was dangerous. He didn’t. Hal tried to speak up but looking at the little alien in charge he found his voice leaving him. The thing's eyes were piercing and looking at them Hal found himself getting lost and tired. He couldn’t see Laurel. He couldn’t hear her breathing. He couldn’t reach out in any direction and know he’d touch her shoulder. She was gone, and he was being dragged away.

Kilowog brought him to a white room with white machines all over the place that looked like every hospital Hal had ever seen and left him there.

Alone.


	6. Accusation

Carol Ferris didn’t seem surprised to wake up in the secret hospital of a super hero team. Or bothered. Or to hear anything any of them had to say.  
  
“Where’s Razer?” she asked in answer to every question they threw at her.  
  
“Are you alright?”  
  
“I’m fine. Where’s Razer?”  
  
“Did he abduct you?”  
  
“No. Where’s Razer?”  
  
“Is the Earth in danger?”  
  
“When isn’t it. Where’s Razer?”  
  
“Why do you care?” Thea finally yelled, tired of Oliver and Barry dominating the interrogation and getting nowhere.  
  
“He’s hurt,” Carol said. “I want to protect him.”  
  
“How’d you get tangled up with an alien?” Oliver asked. It was, Thea thought, the first reasonable thing he’d asked all day.  
  
Carol opened her mouth and closed it. Then cocked her head from side to side a few times as though she were weighing her options.  
  
“It’s a long story,” she said finally.  
  
“We have time,” Oliver said dully.  
  
“Well, I guess in short I’m kind of a, uh, space cop. I was…recruited, I guess, a few years ago. I go back and forth between the planet I’m based off of and Earth. Now where’s Razer?”  
  
“Are you an alien?” Barry asked. Carol actually snorted.  
  
“No, all human.”  
  
“Then how did you get recruited?”  
  
Carol held out her hand to them. There was a ring similar to the one Razer kept showing them on one of her fingers, but hers was glowing a faint pink color.  
  
“The wand chooses the wizard, Harry,” Carol said. “This ring is like a badge for us. It’s linked into powers no human can comprehend. It’s alive, basically. And it chose me. I could have ignored it, waited for it to move on to another bearer or something, but where’s the fun in that?  
  
“Now,” she continued. “Razer is my charge. He’s a colleague and a friend. He’s sick, and being targeted for assassination. I can’t protect him from that if you’re treating him like some kind of invader and detaining him.”  
  
“He is an invader,” Oliver said. “He’s an alien on this world and even if he is here to hide from danger, we don’t know that that won’t fire back on us somehow. He could bring the danger here. We need to protect the planet.”  
  
“No,” Carol said, “you really don’t. That’s my job. And you know what? There are a lot of aliens on this planet. A lot of peaceful creatures who just wanted to see the sights, or get away from a bad situation on another planet. I brought Razer here to hide him. What’s after him won’t hurt anyone but him. It can’t. It’s a virus that’s attacking Red Lanterns. Now I’m just about tired of this little dick measuring contest, so I’ll be going to get him out of here whether you like it or not.”  
  
“Carol you’ve got burns over 15% of your body,” Caitlin said delicately. “I don’t really think you can make us do anything. We’re just trying to make sure we have all the right answers.”  
  
Before Thea could blink, Carol was hovering three feet above her bed, holding out the hand with her ring. A pink bubble grew out until it hit them all and pushed them to the wall of the infirmary.  
  
“No offense,” Carol said. “But I’m connected to the fabric of the very universe. I’ve been cooperating with you because I’m a Star Sapphire and love and compassion are kind of our things. But Razer is a very dear friend. And I want to see him now, please.”  
  
“Alright!” Barry said. He was nearly invisible to Thea, running incredibly fast trying to phase through whatever was holding the rest of them in place. He couldn’t seem to figure it out, but as soon as he said it the thing disappeared and the rest of them landed back on the ground.  
  
Thea gasped, trying to get as much air as she could after the compression and watched with narrowed eyes as Barry led Carol out of the room and to the pipeline. Carol flew behind him, and Thea got the distinct impression it was a power play.   
  
Oliver followed behind them, but no one else in the room was moving. Thea jumped up and run after them, even as Cisco and Caitlin tried to call her back.  
  
They may have discerned that the Earth wasn’t in immediate danger, but Thea still had questions. She didn’t want to ask them in front of Barry and Ollie, but she would if she had to.   
  
She arrived in the middle of a conversation between Razer and Carol that made no sense to her. Or Oliver or Barry, apparently. They were both standing by Razer’s open cell door watching Razer speak his own language while Carol spoke English. Neither seemed at all confused by what the other was saying.  
  
“Not all humans, dude,” Carol said. To which Razer said…something. Carol laughed.  
  
“I can believe that Carol understands him,” Thea whispered to her brother, “but I didn’t really get the feeling that he understood us at all. What, uh, what gives?”  
  
“I really don’t now.”  
  
“Maybe the ring translates for her?” Barry said quietly.  
  
“How would a ring translate?” Oliver scoffed.  
  
“How would a ring make a hard light construct that I couldn’t phase through?”  
  
“So we can leave, right?” Carol interrupted.   
  
“As long as the Earth’s not in any danger,” Barry said, at the same time that Thea said, "No."  
  
Carol turned to stare her down. Thea felt the tiniest bit intimidated because she was still flying, but clamped it down.  
  
“We’re not here to hurt anyone,” Carol said lowly. “We’re here to hide and stay safe.”  
  
“Yeah I know, it’s not that.”  
  
“Then what is it?” Carol rolled her eyes.  
  
“Do you know someone named Hal Jordan?” Thea asked.  
  
“Speedy, we don’t need to investigate a missing pilot,” Oliver said quietly.  
  
“No you don’t, especially since he’s not missing. I know him, he’s fine.”  
  
“What about Laurel Lance? Do you know Laurel Lance?”  
  
“Speedy!” Oliver hissed. “What the hell are you getting at?”  
  
Thea ignored him. Carol had reacted stronger to that than any of the questions about being a danger to the planet earlier. And weirder still, so had Razer the alien. He was looking at Carol as though waiting for translation, he probably didn’t understand everything she had said. But he’d understood something. He and Carol had the same look on their face’s though. Like they pitied Thea.  
  
“You do!” she yelled at them. “And so does your pal Hal, huh? He went off the grid the same time Laurel did. What did he do to her, Carol? Why did he take her?”  
  
“Laurel’s not—” Oliver started, “Laurel’s missing?” he finished weakly.  
  
“No,” Carol said quietly. “Hal didn’t take Laurel. They went into space together. They trained together. They were best friends, closer than siblings. He would never have hurt her.”  
  
Something in Thea’s stomach dropped.  
  
Carol was using the past tense.  
  
“What, Laurel’s a space cop too?” Oliver asked incredulously.  
  
Thea didn’t want Carol to answer.  
  
“She was a Red Lantern,” Carol said. Past tense again. “Like Razer. She was in danger, just like Razer. We lost contact with her a few days after we left for Earth. We—we think she’s dead.”


	7. Liberation

The prison for Red Lanterns on Oa looked much the same as the detention cell she’d spent the better part of two years in, but of course there’s a big different between being stuck because of a malfunctioning computer program and being locked up on purpose by some kind of higher command. There was also the fact that the former came with Hal, while the latter came with a bunch of aliens all sporting dead power rings so none of them could understand each other. Laurel may have had a cute cat for a neighbor, but she felt Hal’s absence in her bones.  
  
He came to visit every day, but looking at him each time the guards pulled her out of her cell and brought her to the interrogation room where he was waiting for him was like being allowed a single spoonful of water every few hours when you were lost in the desert. And each day the spoon got smaller and smaller. Because the longer she was stuck in a cell while Hal got training and freedom and made new friends within the same Green Lantern Corps that was locking her up, the more she wondered if he was serious every time he said “I’m gonna get you out of here.”  
  
“It’s the ring,” Hal said. “The Guardians are just trying to find a way to get the ring off you and then you’ll be free. They know you’re not a danger without it.”  
  
“I’m not a danger with it, either,” Laurel said. “It doesn’t even work anymore, Hal. It’s just jewelry now.”  
  
“It’s still affecting you. You punched a guard the other day!”  
  
Laurel rolled her eyes.  
  
“He was picking on Dexter.”  
  
“Dex-Starr is an intergalactic terrorist.”  
  
“He’s a cat,” Laurel said. “He’s got a fluffy little tail and I watch him lick his ass daily.”  
  
“And his ring has warped his mind, turned him into a killing machine. The things he says, Laurel.” Hal shook his head. “He’s psychotic.”  
  
“He’s a cat,” she repeated dully. “He meows. Sometimes he hisses, ooh scary.”  
  
“His and your ring’s are de-powered, you can’t understand him. But I can. He wants to burn the whole planet down.”  
  
“Yeah,” Laurel hissed, “he’s a cat. Use that ring on any cat, Hal. I think you’ll find they all say the same thing.”  
  
Hal dropped his forehead onto the table between them while Laurel dropped hers back, staring up at the ceiling.   
  
“You heard what the Reds on Earth said, Laurel,” Hal mumbled. “About hurling the Earth into the sun. They’re bad news, Laurel.”  
  
“Yeah? Do they abduct people and use a prison shuttle to bring them thousands of lightyears away from their home planet?”  
  
“They do worse,” Hal said seriously.  
  
“Your new friends tell you that?”  
  
“Yes, they did.”  
  
“Well I wouldn’t really know anything about that,” Laurel hissed. “You see you’re still the only person who talks to, what with the only other people I see being ones I can’t understand but you claim are murderers. Well, plus guards who tell me I’m one too. So who’s right, Hal? Are the same guards who call me an animal the ones telling you all the bad things about the rest of them?”  
  
“I don’t want to fight,” Hal said tiredly. He finally lifted his head and looked her in the eye. “I just want to make sure you’re doing okay in here.”   
  
“I’m not.”  
  
“I know. I’m sorry.”  
  
They stared at each other in silence. It was like the early days of the detention cell when they didn’t really know each other. They knew each other now, they just didn’t know what to say to each other.   
  
“We have a lead,” Hal said at last.  
  
Laurel stayed quiet.  
  
“The rings don’t come off on their own. I mean you know, we’ve tried. But they’re magnets for anger, right? There are other rings, other emotions. Kilowog and I have been thinking about maybe one of them can help. Maybe Love or Hope or can, I don’t know, fight off the anger long enough to get the ring off. To free you.”  
  
Laurel snorted again.   
  
“You still think I need freeing from the ring. The ring’s not the thing keeping me in a cage. The ring let me fly.”  
  
He ignored that.  
  
“There’s a transport to Astonia leaving tomorrow,” he said. “There are Blue Lanterns who are willing to try. I pulled some strings, moved you up the priority list for Reds to try it on.”  
  
“Thanks,” Laurel said, with a fairly large amount of sarcasm. “Will they give me a ride back to Earth, too? Or will I be better served hitchhiking? Hope they at least give me a towel.”  
  
Hal smiled sadly at her.  
  
“I’ll be right there next to you when they try, alright. It’s leaving tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”  
  
He got up and left the room. They had tried to hug the first few visits, but the guards always kept them apart. So they stopped trying, and Laurel stopped wanting it anyway.  
  
She let them pick her up by their ring and drag her back to her cage, and when they closed the door she flopped back on her bed. The cat that was her next door neighbor meowed loudly.  
  
She wished she could pet the damn thing. It meowed a lot and scratched at the walls. No matter what Hal or the other guards said about it wanting to kill them all and burn the bodies, Laurel knew cats. The poor thing just wanted some attention. I mean she still didn’t quite understand how 1) a cat got a power ring, and 2) why the Green Lanterns would lock a cat up in space jail. But there it was anyway. Meowing away and butting its head against the door. Poor thing.  
  
“Alright?” said a gravely voice from Laurel’s other neighbor. They had been working the last few weeks have some kind of linguistic understanding, each picking up tidbits of the other’s language. If it was working, and they were actually communicating, then her name was Bleez.  
  
“Yes,”   
  
“Bastards,” Bleez spat. Bleez hated the guards. Laurel thought she’d likely punch any guard that tried to mess with her like they often did to Dex-Starr the cat, but she suspected Bleez would manage to do a lot worse on her own.  
  
“We leave tomorrow,” Laurel hoped she said in Bleez’s language. “For cure. Maybe.”  
  
“Doubtful,” Bleez said. “Torture.”  
  
This wasn’t the first prison Bleez had been in, from what Laurel could understand. And, while their language lessons hadn’t gotten that in-depth, Laurel could tell the other one had scarred her deeply both physically and mentally.  
  
Or well, their communication wasn’t really fool proof. She thought it was the other prison that had been so cruel to Bleez. Hoped there even was a second prison. But the thought that it was here, that it was the Green Lanterns that had hurt her so deeply stuck in Laurel head.  
  
The next morning the Green Lantern guards collected their whole cell block up onto a ship that looked like what Laurel and Hal’s used to before it’d splintered apart. Only many times the size, because when they followed the same path Laurel and Hal had flown they arrived at a detention wing big enough for a dozen of them.  
  
Laurel didn’t see Hal, and had just started to assume he changed his mind about being there when she could feel lift-off start, and the in-room guards switched out. It was Hal and the big orange tusked alien that had dragged him away from her when they first arrived on Oa. Hal stood in front of her cell and looked at her the whole time the ship rose through the air, when it bumped its way through the atmosphere, and when it began gliding easier through space.   
  
Barely an hour into the trip other Green Lanterns rushed into the room to start whispering to Hal and his friend. More of them started running around, switching postings and checking screens.  
  
Bleez said something, but the only word that Laurel could pick out was “escape.”  
  
Hal ran out of the room just when Laurel was thrown off her cot, the whole ship veering to its side.   
  
Something clanged loudly on the wall of Laurel’s cell, the one separating her from the void of space. It happened again, and then again, and then again. She stepped back nervously eyeing the growing dent. Hal said their rings could actually help them survive in the void of space, a fact they both wish they’d known before they let a semi-sentient space ship abduct them. But her ring wasn’t working. None of the imprisoned Reds had working rings. If the haul broke, they’d die in seconds.  
  
It only took one more hit for the wall to fracture, and Laurel closed her eyes ready to be sucked violently through the crack like in the movies. But she didn’t. She opened one eye and saw the hole being forced open by a familiar hard red light. It opened wide enough for her to see a tall, humanoid alien with grayish blue skin floating out, looking around at the cell. Behind him she saw a horned alien holding a literal red lantern, and behind her a large red bubble protecting the prisoners from space.  
  
“Are you okay?” the alien asked.   
  
“All of our rings are dead,” she said by way of answering. He nodded as if he expected that.  
  
“How many of you are there?”  
  
“12.”  
  
The grey alien made a blade and slashed it through the interior walls, which cut like paper. Bleez didn’t waste time standing around like Laurel was and ran straight to the horned alien with the lantern. She held her hand right up to it and said something. Laurel could only understand a few of the words.   
  
“Blood,” said Bleez. “Rage…red. Dead…burn.”  
  
With each word Bleez’s ring seemed to glow brighter, and at the end Bleez was floating in the air, smiling for the first time since Laurel had met her. She flew straight out of the ship without a backwards glance.  
  
Laurel turned away and saw the grey alien had freed the rest, and they were lining up to power up their rings. The door to the rest of the ship was closed and locked, the control panel destroyed. She was sure the Greens on the other side were working on breaking in, but they were also probably busy with the rest of the attack.   
  
“Are you sure you’re unhurt?” Her grey rescuer was looking at her with open concern on his face.  
  
“I don’t know how to power up my ring,” Laurel said. “I only just got it when I…ended up here.”  
  
He frowned deeply and looked around at he other cells, and the shaking wall to the rest of the ship.  
  
“Assholes,” he muttered to the absent Green Lanterns. Then he turned back to her. “It’s an oath. You say it, and it connects you to the emotional spectrum.”  
  
Laurel frowned.   
  
“Here,” the others were all gone now, it was just the two rescuers now. The grey one grabbed the lantern from the horned one, who flew off to join the fight somewhere else in the space around their ship. “Just repeat after me.”  
  
“With blood and rage of crimson red,” he said.  
  
“With blood and rage of crimson red,” Laurel repeated.  
  
“Ripped from a corpse so freshly dead,”   
  
“R-ripped from a corpse so freshly…dead,”  
  
“Together with our hellish hate,”  
  
Laurel paused for a long time, but made her way through the speech.  
  
“Together with our hellish hate,”  
  
“We'll burn you all--That is your fate.”  
  
God this was sick. It was so sick. The alien feeding her the lines didn’t even look okay with it. He was frowning deeply. Laurel could see her ring start to glow, could feel the power start to come back to her. But god this was sick.  
  
“We’ll burn you all,” she said finally. “That is your fate.”  
  
Laurel didn’t even have to consciously think to fly in the air. It had been so long and she missed it so much - she closed her eyes and relished it. She thought of her little canary bird again, the one Abin Sur had taught her how to make. She opened her eyes and there it was, flying in front of her saying hello.  
  
“We need to get out of here.” The door to the rest of the ship gave a mighty clang. The alien looked back at Laurel and she nodded. Just then it opened though, and Hal came flying out. Laurel’s new friend sped out of the ship, but Laurel stopped.  
  
“Laurel!” Hal gripped her arm.  
  
“I need to leave,” she said. She didn’t pull her arm back.  
  
“I—” Hal let go of her arm like it had burned him.  
  
“I can’t stay with the Green Lanterns,” Laurel begged. Hal wasn’t holding on to her any more. She could leave without him, but she needed him to understand. “Please let’s just you and I leave. I can’t stay here!”  
  
“I know! I know I know I just—”  
  
“Rookie!” A red light shot through the hole in the outer wall and before Laurel could think she put up a shield to block her and Hal. The grey alien had come back for her and was staring in complete confusion at her and Hal. “Come on!”  
  
“Go,” Hal said. “Go with them. The Guardians were going to execute you all if the Blue Lanterns didn’t manage to get your rings off, so you just…you need to run. But I can’t go with you.”  
  
Laurel pulled him into a fierce hug.  
  
“You’re my best friend,” she said into his shoulder. “I love you.”  
  
“I love you, too.”  
  
And Laurel left him there.  
  
She flew out of the hole where her rescuer was waiting still completely baffled. And together they flew out into open space, where a huge dark spacecraft was floating, engine’s lit and ready to fly away once they were all through the big cargo doors at the bottom. She made it in and looked back at the gravely damaged green ship.  
  
Why wouldn’t he go with her. Damn him, why was he staying with those green assholes. She hated him in that moment, that asshole. He left her alone, again. Goddamn asshole.  
  
“Ready the main canon!”  
  
Laurel’s head snapped up, trying to find out who had yelled. There were too many people, too many aliens wearing red uniforms all standing and floating around. She didn’t even know where a control deck would be.  
  
“No,” she heard herself whisper. They’d already won. They got all the prisoners out and re-powered up.  
  
“Kill the green bastards!” someone yelled.  
  
“No,” Laurel said again. No one paid her any mind. No one but her grey friend.  
  
“Don’t say that,” he hissed. “They’ll hear you.”  
  
She wanted to say she didn’t care, but she was more concerned with stopping whoever was about to fire.   
  
There was a loud sharp whine and Laurel looked out the slowly closing doors just in time to see a laser hit the Green Lantern ship and destroy it completely.  
  
“NO!” Laurel cried. She was drowned out by cheers all around her. Arms came around her and caught her before she fell to the floor.  
  
“Don’t let them hear you,” the grey alien hissed again. “You need to act happy.”  
  
Happy like Bleez and Dex-Starr and all the other prisoners, laughing and hugging each other a few feet away. Happy like the horned alien who’d brought the lantern, who had brought out some drink to toast with. Happy like the big red alien hovering above the rest, looking down on them all with a proud gleam in his eye.  
  
Dammit all. The green assholes were right.


	8. Contention

“How could you do this to me?!”  
  
“I didn’t do anything to you, Ollie.”  
  
“You lied to me!”  
  
“I kept something from you. There’s a difference.”  
  
“Semantics? Really?”  
  
Thea glared at him for a second but quickly returned her eyes to the road. She caught a glimpse of the uncomfortable…well everyone in the back seat of the car. Curtis was avidly looking at every single tree they passed on the road, Diggle was pretending to be asleep, and Lyla had her eyes glued to her phone. She really wished they weren’t having this conversation in front of the others, but well, that was Ollie for you. He would keep every secret imaginable from the team, but the second someone tried to keep something from him he aired the dirty laundry for all to see. In fact…  
  
“You keep secrets all the time, Oliver,” Thea said. “Especially from me. You’ve lied to my face dozens of times. This was just something I was checking out on the side. It had nothing to do with you.”  
  
“Laurel’s safety has everything to do with me,” Oliver hissed. “She was my girlfriend. I love her.”  
  
Thea was glad they’d at least agreed to turn off their coms for their little family feud; Felicity may have been the one to break up with Oliver but she’d still made no secret about how much she didn’t like hearing about his exes.  
  
“Well I’m sorry,” Thea said, struggling to sound earnest when she was still annoyed. And in pain. In a lot of pain, really. “She said she wanted you out of her life. Tommy and I wanted to honor that.”  
  
“Wait,” Oliver said, and Thea suddenly felt like an asshole. “Tommy knew? Tommy was in on this with you?” Shit. Sorry, Tommy.  
  
“Yes,” Thea said tiredly.  
  
“How long have you known she was in trouble? How long could we have saved her if you’d just told me?”  
  
“Don’t you dare, Oliver!” Thea yelled. The wheel jerked under her tense hands and everyone in the backseat tensed and reached for the Oh-Shit-Handles. She took a deep breath and steadied the car.  
  
“I’ve been talking to her for about 6 years. I first suspected that something was wrong when you came back, but when she visited a year later I figured it was nothing. A week ago I got a really weird phone call from her. Tommy and I looked into it on our own as much as we could. We asked Curtis for help two days ago.”  
  
Ollie swiveled in his seat to give a withering look to Curtis, who shrunk back. Satisfied with just that, at least, he turned back to his sister.  
  
“How could you not know until then?”  
  
“Because she wasn’t kidnapped, Ollie,” Thea said. “You heard Carol. She might have gone up into space unwillingly, but she lived there on her own. She had friends, a life. She didn’t want us to know she was…off world.”  
  
“She was sick,” Oliver said, his voice cracking. “She was sick and I could have done something if I’d known.”  
  
“Done what?” Thea asked gently. “Bought NASA? She lived on another planet. She had people with her when she got sick. People and aliens who knew what was wrong. Us being there,” she felt tears build up in her eyes and willed them away. “Us being there would have been for us. Not for her. There’s nothing we could do.”  
  
“Carol didn’t know for sure if she was dead,” Ollie said.  
  
“I know.”  
  
“She just said they lost contact.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“She could be alright.”  
  
“I texted her when we were still with Carol and Razer,” Thea said. “I didn’t hear back.”  
  
“Is that normal?”  
  
“Yeah, but I haven’t heard from in her in about 4 days. That’s when Carol said she and Razer left wherever they came from.”  
  
“What are the other leads?” Oliver had his Green Arrow voice on. Thea wished she weren’t driving so she could close her eyes to focus up her energy to deal with him when he was like this.  
  
“We don’t need leads, Ollie. We found her. She was in space.”  
  
“There have to be other ways to contact her.”  
  
“Yeah, they’re called Carol and Razer. We found them, too. They have nothing.”  
  
“Well…” Oliver swiveled around to stare at Curtis when he spoke up. He gulped audibly but continued on, rather bravely Thea thought. “I mean we could try Clark Kent again?”  
  
“Who’s Clark Kent?”  
  
“He took a picture of Laurel the one time she came to visit,” Thea said.  
  
Oliver looked between the two of them blankly.  
  
“And then she brought him pizza. We don’t really know what it means, but at the very least they know each other,” Curtis said.  
  
“Do you think he’s a space cop, too?” Diggle said, abandoning the fake sleep thing.  
  
“I don’t know,” Curtis said. “I don’t know if he has any way to get in contact with Laurel that Thea and Carol don’t, but well, it’s one more person to ask, right?”  
  
“Right,” Oliver agreed gravely. His voice was mostly back to his own, but Thea still saw that archer’s glint in his eye: hyper focused and ready for a fight. “Call him.”  
  
“What?” Curtis asked. “Now?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Curtis looked around the car as if any one of them could save him, then shrugged and got his phone out. He scrolled around for a bit looking for Clark’s number. Thea kind of doubted it’d be listed, but a few minutes later Curtis held his phone up to his ear.  
  
“It’s ringing,” he said.  
  
“Put it on speaker,” Oliver demanded. Curtis shrugged and the car was filled with the sound of a dial tone.  
  
“This is Clark Kent,” a deep voice answered after a few seconds, “I can’t come to the phone. Please leave your name, number, and reason for calling and I’ll get back to you soon. Thanks.” The phone beeped but no one said anything.  
  
“If you are satisfied with your message,” a cool robotic voice said, “press 1. If you’d like to re-record, press pound.”  
  
“Press pound,” Oliver said. Curtis did so, and when the phone beeped again this time Oliver actually spoke.  
  
“This is the Green Arrow,” he said, and Thea almost jerked the car off the road again. “You know something about the location of Laurel Lance. I’ll find you to follow up.”  
  
Curtis shakily hung up his phone, everyone in the car focused solely on Oliver.  
  
“What the hell, man?” Diggle said after a moment.  
  
-  
  
When they got back to the Arrow cave Thea felt the strangest sense of deja vu.  
  
“How dare you!” Sara was yelling at Tommy. Quentin was pacing behind her back.  
  
Great, Thea thought, the gang’s all here. Sara had beat their car back to the city, apparently.  
  
“You know what!” Tommy yelled right back in her face. “I may have gone a few years talking to Laurel without realizing she was apparently off the freaking planet, but at least I didn’t go that many years with zero contact at all without ever once thinking ‘hey that might be weird’!”  
  
“TOMMY!” Oliver shouted.  
  
“WHAT?!”  
  
“Leave them alone.”  
  
“Tell them to leave me alone!”  
  
“No, why don’t you tell him to stay out of my family’s business!” Quentin yelled.  
  
“No one tell anyone anything!” Felicity yelled. “I mean come on we’re all in the same room we can talk to each other…” She kept muttering to herself. Sara talked over her.  
  
“So what’s the plan? How are we going to get Laurel?”  
  
“We’re calling a someone who knows her. He’ll tell us how to get there,” Oliver said, as if that was their plan.  
  
“We left a voicemail,” Thea corrected, “with someone who took a picture of her two years ago.”  
  
Sara gave him an incredulous look.  
  
“That’s all you have? Someone who might know her? And you’re just hoping he’ll be able to find her when her space cop friends back there couldn’t?”  
  
“It’s something, alright?” Oliver said.  
  
“Hey can we stop calling them space cops?” Felicity asked. “It makes me take the whole thing a little less seriously than I think the rest of you are.”  
  
“It’s not something,” Sara insisted. “You clearly haven’t been looking hard enough for leads. Let me—”  
  
“Woah woah woah!” Curtis said. “You don’t get to come in here and bad mouth my search aright. I don’t care how many people you’ve killed — wait no I just said it out loud and heard what it sounded like and I take it back. I absolutely care how many people you’ve killed; insult my skills all you want, I’m going to go over here now.”  
  
Curtis shuffled his way over to the computer console where Felicity patted him gently on the shoulder, both content to let the more aggressive personalities duke it out.  
  
“Where’d Rip go?” Sara asked. “I’m making him take me back to when Laurel got abducted.”  
  
“He’s not going to let you mess with the timeline,” Lyla said.  
  
“Then he’ll take me forward to when commercial spaceships are available, we’ll bring one back here, and I’ll go out into space and get her myself.”  
  
“That doesn’t sound possible,” Curtis muttered then turned around and looked busy, like he hadn’t spoken at all.  
  
“You know what, Sara,” Tommy said, “go on and do that. Go find your buddy and ask him to do that, then get on your ship and fly away and let the grown ups find Laurel.”  
  
Thea jumped in the middle before Sara could actually kill Tommy, but the fact that he seemed so pleased with himself really wasn’t helping matters.  
  
“Tommy, get the hell out of here!” Quentin shouted. He looked like he was about to deck Tommy himself, and Thea hoped Ollie would intervene on that front because blocking Sara was kind of a chore for her.  
  
“Oh come on Quentin, don’t you get it? Laurel was on a different planet and she managed to call you to let you know she was okay. Sara waited until Oliver dragged her back to the land of the living kicking and screaming to tell you she was. How are you on her side?”  
  
And then Quentin punched Tommy in the face.  
  
-  
  
A few minutes later, after everyone had been banished to separate corners and Tommy was given some ice for his eye, they all sat down again and tried to have an adult conversation to get on the same page about everything.  
  
“When exactly did Carol and Razer,” Felicity rolled her eyes at the name, “leave…space.”  
  
“They said 4 Earth days ago,” Thea answered.  
  
“Is that actually how they phrased it?”  
  
“Yes,” Oliver cut off Felicity’s giggle.  
  
“And that was the same time I heard from Laurel last,” Thea said, before anyone could snipe at anyone else.  
  
“What did you talk about?” Diggle asked.  
  
Thea pulled out her phone to check the exact conversation, having to scroll up past her many concerned “hey I know you’re in space but are you alive” texts.  
  
“The Arrested Development movie.”  
  
“Are you kidding me?” Sara sighed.  
  
“We had normal conversations, okay?” Thea snapped.  
  
“What time was that?” Tommy asked, his own phone out.  
  
“Um…3pm.”  
  
“Okay I have something from 9pm.”  
  
“What did she say?” Diggle asked again.  
  
“Something about hating powdered food.”  
  
“How is this helpful?!” Sara shouted.   
  
“We’re not yelling anymore,” Lyla demanded. Sara audibly ground her teeth.  
  
“We’re just establishing a timeline for when, exactly she went incommunicado,” Tommy said.  
  
“Carol and Razer said they lost contact with her after they headed for Earth. So it was definitely after both of our texts with her,” Thea said. “Carol said it was two days ago.”  
  
“What good does any of this do us unless we can get out there to look on the ground?” Quentin said lowly.  
  
“That’s why Sara is talking to Rip, right Sara?” Oliver said calmly. Sara checked her phone again.  
  
“He’s still not responding.”  
  
“Should we make a timeline of answered texts for him, too?” Felicity asked. Thea glared at her, and she put her hands up apologetically.  
  
“Sorry, sorry, geez.”  
  
Thea felt something in her back pocket and eagerly pulled her phone out.  
  
“I’m sorry are we boring you?” Oliver snapped.  
  
“It’s Laurel!” she said without any bite.  
  
“Put it on speaker!” Oliver yelled for the second time that day.  
  
“It’s a text,” Thea said.  
  
“What’s it say?” Tommy asked.   
  
“Um.” She felt their eyes fall on her and she held her breath. “Not that talk soup story.”  
  
Thea didn’t think she was the only one about ready to tear their hair out.  
  
“Someone find out how Carol and Razer got on this damn planet,” Oliver growled, “and then get ready to steal it.”


	9. Desertion

Hal felt like a real cruddy Green Lantern after the prison break. A lot of Green Lanterns were feeling pretty cruddy, what with the Reds having blown up their ship and killing a dozen Greens, but he got to feel bad for that and for basically letting Laurel fly off to her almost certain death. And also for feeling worse about that than he did about the dead Green Lanterns. Because he cared more about Laurel than he did any of them. Despite the fact that she was a Red, despite the fact that she was on the ship that had destroyed theirs, and despite the fact that she’d wanted so desperately to get away from him.  
  
So yeah, he though. A pretty cruddy Green Lantern.  
  
This was technically his first encounter with any Red Lantern not locked up on Oa. He’d seen the damage from returned Lanterns of course, read the reports of planets decimated and innocent colonies slaughtered. He knew they were monsters. He knew it. But he also knew that Laurel didn’t deserve to be lumped up with the rest of them. So to help her, he’d shipped her up with the rest of them and hoped for the best.  
  
Some friend he was. He’d just…given up on convincing the Guardians that she was different. Green Lanterns were supposed to be stubborn, willful. Like the Guardians, really. Hal had managed to mostly convince his friend Kilowog that Laurel was innocent, but the Guardians were the ones who held the real power on Oa and within the entire Green Lantern Corps. And they refused to be moved, as stubborn as any of their ring bearers.  
  
That stubbornness was probably the universe’s only hope against the Red Lanterns though. Their leader, Atrocitus, was a monster without a cause. He just wanted to watch the world burn, and then another world, and then any other world he could get his hands on. There were other Lanterns, Blue and Violet and Yellow, he’d heard, but they stayed to their corners of the universe. They protected the planets they could, and as far as the Green Lanterns were concerned were just waiting in line for slaughter.  
  
Green Lanterns were willful, though. They didn’t just pick out a handful of planets to stop the Red Lanterns from destroying they picked out all of them. And the two have been fighting ever since. None of the Green Lantern’s he’d talked to knew exactly when it started. From what he’d been told, the war between the Red Lanterns and Green Lanterns had been going on for centuries, with no real end in sight.

The prison break was just another battle to a lot of Greens, and the rest of the corps was ready to move on to the next one dragging Hal along whether he wanted to or not.  
  
“There’s some rumors,” Kilowog whispered to him in the gym a few weeks after the massacre. “About unrest in the Red Lantern Corps.”  
  
“What kind of unrest?” Hal muttered between his punches.  
  
“Leaked strategies, supply shortages — that sort of thing.”  
  
“What do the Guardians think?”  
  
“They don’t,” Kilowog grunted. “Their mind is that it must be other Corps finally joining the fight. They think Blue.”  
  
“You disagree?”  
  
“I think if there’s a weak link I want to hit it with a hammer.”  
  
And of course Kilowog was the very picture of a stubborn old Green Lantern. So it was not even a week later that they conned their way onto a reconnaissance mission with a secondary mission of their own.  
  
“There’s a growing number of Red Lantern ships on this planet, so we need to figure out if they’re using the planet as a hub or if it's a target,” Kilowog told Hal as they were docking. “But if we follow the path of internalized destruction, this planet could be where our weak link is, so we want to find them, too.”  
  
Hal nodded, putting on as brave a face as he could. His first mission out with with the Greens had been a, well a total disaster. But this one would be better. It was just him and Kilowog, who he genuinely liked, and a mission he cared at least a little about. The Guardians might just want him to look into the growing number of ships and report back on how many Reds it equaled, and that was all fine and good, but finding out if there was some kind of infighting or subpar soldier or even a spy, that was better.   
  
“There’s something I should probably tell you about this planet though, now that we’re far enough away from Oa.”  
  
“It’s a merchant planet,” Hal recited from the briefings. “The largest in the system. And they don’t take well to violence so we’ve gotta play nice, keep a low profile. Can’t go down in uniform.”  
  
“Well yeah,” Kilowog agreed, “but it’s a bit more than a merchant planet. It’s a black market. Nothing they sell here is approved by the Guardians. I fudged the details in my proposal to the get the Guardians to let us come.”  
  
Hal’s eyes widened and he stared at his friend, who fidgeted uncomfortably as he powered their ship down.  
  
“What?” Kilowog snapped.  
  
“I’m just so impressed right now,” Hal said. Kilowog grunted. “No seriously, you saved an entire planet from being shut down just so you could break a totally unrelated Guardian mandate.”  
  
“Don’t get cheeky, Jordan.”  
  
“And to think no one on the ground will know how close they came to total annihilation at the hands of some killjoy Green Lanterns.” Kilowog stood up and walked away from Hal to exit the ship.   
  
“I’m sure they’d build a statue of you if they knew,” Hal called down to him. “But you’re not that kind of hero. You save people from the shadows. A dark knight.”  
  
“Can it and stay close, Jordan. They eat Earthens like you for breakfast on places like this.”

A place like this was something straight out of one of the movies Hal and Laurel used to play out on their prison shuttle. There were hundreds of ships docked on ports and between each of them were bright and flashy merchants trying to sell off goods. Some of them were in tents, some in little buildings, but all of them were shouting at every passerby. Unlike their favorite Earthen sci-fi movies, the people passing weren't human (or incredibly human looking aliens). Hal didn't know what species, if any, were native to this planet because there didn't seem to be more than two or three of any kind.  
  
Hal tried not to look like the tiny insignificant human from an underdeveloped planet he knew he was as he wandered past dozens of stalls at the port. Kilowag stopped them casually when they saw and old Red ship. They had seen it when they were coming in for landing, but had parked far enough away to make sure they’re approach could be slow and casual. They stopped into a few different building, talked to the locals, and kept it in their peripheral.   
  
They kept track of each Red that walked in and out of the ship, how much food they were bringing on board, and where in the city-planet they went to when they left.  
  
Then they walked to another ship and did the same.  
  
And another.  
  
There were 8 Red Lantern ships docked on this side of the planet, 4 on the opposite side. They’d spend the next week watching every one of them to report back to the Guardians.  
  
It was on their 6th ship though that they got a breakthrough on the secret part of their mission.  
  
“It’s the dude,” Hal whispered, watching a Red Lantern wearing a dumb little helmet and shoulder pads get off the ship.  
  
“What dude?” Kilowog asked in a tone that said he really didn’t respect the word dude.  
  
“The grey dude from the prison break.”  
  
“What? Where?” Kilowog turned the exact opposite of casually to follow Hal’s gaze and look at the blueish grey alien that had led the breakout from the prison transport. He’d flown behind Laurel, led her to the Red ship right before theirs had been blown to bits and Hal and Kilowog had had to fly on their own back to safety, desperately hoping their rings didn’t give out on the trip.  
  
“That’s Razer,” Kilowog told him. “He’s an asshole.”  
  
“How do you know his name?”  
  
“I’ve fought him before. Took him prisoner for a minute, but he broke out. I guess it’s kind of his specialty now.”  
  
“The last time I saw him was with Laurel,” Hal muttered. Kilowog had gone back to looking casual, but Hal was struggling.  
  
“Obviously,” Kilowog said.  
  
“The weak link could be sabotage,” Hal said. They’d touched on the idea briefly, but hadn’t wanted to get too hopeful about help from within the Reds as opposed to just someone being incompetent or too selfish for the Corps’ own interest.  
  
“Could be,” Kilowog grunted.  
  
“It could be Laurel!”  
  
“Cool your jets, Jordan,” Kilowog said, turning Hal away from the Red ship. “Don’t get your hopes up that they haven’t brainwashed your friend yet.”  
  
“Let’s follow him,” Hal said, and then he didn’t wait for Kilowog’s response and just went ahead and started trailing Razer.  
  
“Jordan!” Kilowog hissed, trying to follow him surreptitiously but having some trouble because he was 9 feet tall.  
  
“That guy was the last person I saw with Laurel,” Hal said. Razer was a fast walker, it seemed. Hal rushed around a corner to make sure he didn’t lose the lanky grey alien.  
  
“He was last seen with dozens of Red Lanterns,” Kilowog countered. “And your sister isn’t the point of this mission.”  
  
“I don’t—” Hal stopped abruptly. “Why do you think Laurel’s my sister?”  
  
“What, you mean she’s not?” Kilowog shrugged. “I don’t know, man, I always just assumed.”  
  
“I mean, she’s my best friend. I don’t have a sister, so I guess I don’t know if I love her that but I know Laurel hates her sister so—”  
  
“Hal, I really don’t care. Now let’s go back to watching the ship like we’re supposed to.”  
  
“No,” Hal said. He turned back to find Razer but he had disappeared from the street.  
  
“Dammit.”  
  
Hal suddenly flew against a nearby building, his face smashing against the wall and his ring hand encased in solid light as his arm was wrenched around to his back. He felt Kilowog slam down next to him.  
  
“Why are you following me?”  
  
“Long time no see, Razer,” Kilowog grunted.  
  
“Why,” Razer hissed again, squeezing his light constructs tighter around Hal and Kilowog’s bodies, “are you following me?”  
  
“One of the Red Lanterns you released last month,” Hal grit out, “I want to find her.”  
  
“Shut up, Jordan,” Kilowog warned.  
  
“Why are you only hunting one of them?” Razer asked.  
  
“She’s my friend.”  
  
Hal flew off the wall and landed back against it on his back.  
  
“Red Lanterns aren’t friends with Green Lanterns,” Razer hissed.  
  
“Laurel is. I just want to find her, make sure she’s okay.”  
  
Razer narrowed his eyes at Hal, and he swallowed thickly.  
  
“She escaped your prison and is with her own kind.”  
  
“Laurel’s kind aren’t murderers,” Hal bit.  
  
“You think all Red Lanterns are murderers.” Razer almost seemed to laugh.  
  
“We’ve seen the handiwork of Atrocitus’ dogs,” Kilowog said, face still smashed against the wall.  
  
“You were the one who let her go,” Razer said. “I saw you, you told her to run. Did you let her out to what, become one his dogs?”  
  
“No,” Hal said. “Laurel is kind and just. She won’t let herself get brainwashed like the rest of you.”  
  
“I,” Razer got very close to Hal’s face, “am not brainwashed.”  
  
And then he conjured up a club and smacked them both on the head. Hal was out immediately, but he only hoped Kilowog’s hard head meant he was still conscious enough to fight.  
  
-  
  
“Hey Thea.” Hal woke up groggily. His eyes weren’t focusing. He couldn’t see anything through the blurry fuzz, but he could hear a familiar voice. “It’s me. I mean it’s Laurel.” Laurel! Hal looked around more, but he could still only see vague shapes. “I got your message. Also a—”   
  
“Intergalactic transponder doesn’t translate so well to Earthen.” That was Razer’s voice, Hal thought.  
  
“—new phone. This is the number, if you want to,” Laurel paused. “…call me, I guess? Gotham is…great. I, uh, love it. It’s really hard though, I mean I’m busy a lot. So I might still miss you if you call. So why don’t you text me instead? Or you can call and if it goes to voicemail you can tell me when—”  
  
“What system are we in?” Laurel whispered away from the phone.  
  
“One we won’t be in for long,” Razer answered.   
  
“I could try to figure out time zones, maybe?” Laurel whispered, “No that won’t work I won’t know…I think text will work best,” she said louder. “Or I’ll call you in…some time? Bye, Thea. It was…It was really great to hear from you. Thanks for—”  
  
“Let me go!” Kilowog yelled from somewhere near Hal.  
  
“We’re not even holding you,” someone who wasn’t Razer or Laurel said lazily.  
  
Hal’s eyes were finally working properly enough to make out where he was. It was an enormous warehouse that seemed to be sized for a species as big as Kilowog, because everyone else he could see looked tiny.  
  
Razer was leaning back in a giant chair, looking like some kind action figure sitting in a doll house. Another Red Lantern, one who he remembered from her imprisonment on Oa, was standing above a bed that Kilowog fit on perfectly.  
  
And there was Laurel standing by Hal’s head, hanging up some weird looking phone and looking at him with concern.  
  
“You alright, Hal?” Laurel asked, kneeling down to his level.  
  
“Well my head hurts,” he said easily, “but I can’t think of anyway that would have happened. Except maybe the Red Lantern knocking me unconscious.”  
  
“I also brought you to your friend, but hey I didn’t expect thanks,” Razer said lazily.  
  
“I’m so glad you’re alive,” Laurel smiled. Hal returned it.  
  
“Me too.”   
  
“Glad everything is all warm and fuzzy,” Kilowog said. “But I kind of want to know what’s going on.”  
  
Razer stood up and walked to the empty space between Hal and Kilowog’s bed.  
  
“You don’t think Laurel is the only Red Lantern capable of resisting Atrocitus’ brainwashing, do you?” he said.  
  
“So what, you’re the good Red Lanterns?” Kilowog scoffed.  
  
“No,” Razer said, “we’re the resistance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the longer than normal break. I went on vacation and came back with a bit of writer's block, which seems really unfair because you'd think some good old r&r would help the creative juices but oh well.


	10. Speculation

Carol Ferris and Razer the alien had come to Earth without a communication device that any of Earth heroes had recognized or understood. So Cisco had given them both disposable phones and told them they’d all keep in touch.  
  
They found those phones in multiple pieces barely a mile away from STAR Labs.  
  
“You think they did it themselves?” Tommy asked, holding up the pieces of one of them as if it could start talking on its own and give them all answers. He, Thea, Oliver, Sara, and Curtis had all gone out to investigate the unanswered calls and stagnant signal. Most of them were standing around Tommy trying to help brainstorm, but Sara was pacing like a caged tiger closer to the road.  
  
“I think if more aliens showed up on Earth we’d know,” Oliver said.  
  
“We didn’t before,” Thea muttered. Not quietly enough, of course, because Oliver turned to look at her. “The only reason we knew about them before was because the Flash booby-trapped Carol’s old place,” she said with more intention. “And before that, when Laurel and Hal visited to do whatever they did - they traveled space with none of us being even slightly aware.”  
  
“Why would they make it harder for us to find them?” Oliver grumbled.  
  
“Because that was the whole point of them coming to Earth?” Curtis offered. “I mean they weren’t hiding from us, but they were hiding from someone.”  
  
“So what other leads do we have? Has Clark Kent called us back?” Ollie asked.  
  
“No,” Curtis said.  
  
“Let’s go get him.”  
  
“Ollie, he lives in Metropolis,” Thea said tiredly.  
  
“And Felicity owns a company with a private jet.”  
  
“Uh…” Felicity said over the comms. “I don’t think I should use my private jet for that.”  
  
“What do you mean? Laurel needs our help!”  
  
“Laurel is in space,” Felicity said, “and the city kind of still needs you here. What with Damien Darhk and his wife still at large.”  
  
“This is Laurel, Felicity!” Oliver hissed.  
  
“Listen, I know she’s important to you, but I’ve never met the woman,” Felicity said. Thea got ready to scold her but she kept going. “I know she’s got a whole, what was the word Carol used, corps? A whole corps of people and aliens all looking in to the same problem. This city only has us.”  
  
“I think she’s right,” Tommy said with more enthusiasm than Thea expected.  
  
“Oliver, you can stay here and keep doing that thing you do. Me and Thea and Curtis can go ofter Clark Kent.”  
  
Thea jumped at the chance.  
  
“What a great idea, Tommy!” Thea said. “Darhk still gets covered and Laurel gets the help she needs.”  
  
Oliver ground his teeth so loud they could hear it in their ears through the comms. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, but it was one Thea had grown used to over the last year.  
  
“Keep me informed every step of the way,” he ground out.  
  
“I’m coming with you,” Sara said.  
  
Thea and Tommy made eye contact. Curtis made a movement next to her, like he was trying to get in on it and shake his head as subtly as he could.  
  
Sara had been aggressive ever since she’d found everything out and that had made Curtis incredibly nervous. More nervous that normal, at least.  
  
Thea wasn’t a therapist by any means, but she couldn’t help but think that Sara was acting out because she felt responsible for Laurel’s problem. Or at least she was hoping if she could help Laurel out, it might make up for what Sara had done 9 years earlier.  
  
Thea wanted to keep Curtis on the case, he’d certainly put in plenty of energy and showed a lot of enthusiasm, but she didn’t want to kick Sara off just because she was having trouble handling her emotions. Then again, they were dealing with a lot of strangers throughout this investigation, humans and alien alike. Sara had only been in a room with Carol and Razer for a few minutes before the two of them had left, but Carol hadn’t seemed fond of her.  
  
“Are you sure you aren’t needed with Rip and the gang?” Thea asked delicately. Sara glared at her.  
  
“We’re time travelers. I can take some time off to help my sister.”  
  
-  
  
Clark Kent was a hard man to get ahold of.  
  
They went to his office first and were told by the receptionist that he was following up on a lead, and no one at the paper would dare scare off a source. So they tried his apartment building, only to sit around waiting for 3 hours and having the cops called on them for loitering by an overly proactive doorman.  
  
They’d run off to hide out in the coffee shop across the street by the time the cruiser pulled up, and had just watched the patrolmen get back in and leave when Thea saw a very familiar face walk into the register line.  
  
“What the hell,” she muttered to herself.  
  
“Is he back?” Tommy’s head shot up from the table he’d been napping on.  
  
“No,” Thea said. “But I think that’s Supergirl.”  
  
“Supergirl is from Earth 4 or 8 or 100 or whatever,” Sara said.  
  
“Well then I guess we just found her doppleganger.” Thea nodded her head as casually as she could to the tall blonde ordering a few feet away from them.  
  
“That can’t be Supergirl’s doppleganger,” Sara said. “She’s gotta be in her 40s.”  
  
“Wait till she turns around, though.”  
  
The four of them sat staring at the woman while she paid and turned to wait at the other end of the counter. Sara’s eyes widened in recognition.  
  
“That’s actually Supergirl.”  
  
“Wait, so that woman is an,” Curtis lowered his voice and leaned in dramatically, “alien?”  
  
The all froze as suddenly the woman who might be Supergirl’s doppleganger grabbed her coffee and turned to stare directly at them. It was then that Thea remembered Supergirl had super-hearing.  
  
She walked up and sat down next to Tommy.  
  
“You guys aren’t regulars,” she said casually. “What brings you here.”  
  
“I’m sorry, Kara,” Thea said immediately. Not-Supergirl’s eyes narrowed. “We didn’t mean to ambush you or anything. We’re waiting for someone who lives in the building across the way.”  
  
“How do you know that name?”  
  
“I know I know, we don’t actually know each other. But we know a version of you from another universe.”  
  
Not-Supergirl looked at them like they were crazy, which, you know, rude. She was from another planet; alternate Earths weren’t the weirdest thing about this whole thing. Thea hoped her super-hearing could work as a lie detector like it always did in comic books, because she didn’t feel like fighting a super strong alien in a coffee shop. Thankfully she could see the moment Kara decided to just move on from the weird.  
  
“I go by Karen,” she sighed. “So what are you doing here, then?” She asked as if it was only to polite but she really didn’t want to know.  
  
“There’s a guy across the street who knows something about our friend. Her name is Laurel Lance, and this Clark Kent guy is one of the only people we can tie to her since she went missing.”  
  
Not-Supergirl’s eyebrows rose higher and higher while Thea talked until they were near her hairline.  
  
“So what, you’re hunting Clark because you think he kidnapped Laurel?”  
  
That was a casual way to refer to two people she’d never met.  
  
“You know Clark Kent.” Sara said accusingly. “And Laurel?”  
  
“Yeah I know Clark,” Not-Supergirl scoffed. “He introduced me to Laurel after their fourth date.”  
  
-  
  
As completely unexpected as their run-in with this universe’s Supergirl had been, she still gave them the name of the diner where Clark said he’d be that day. He evidently hadn’t told her he’d be there with a source, but they weren’t going to tell her in case it made her want to stop them from interrupting.  
  
Ambushing an apparently dedicated reporter (who went on at least four dates with Laurel, it seemed important to note) as he was interviewing a political leaker was not what Thea really wanted to do, but they had to hope the story was about government pork and not a potential nuclear war.  
  
“Clark Kent?” Sara asked, storming right up to him and his informant at their corner booth. Whoever Clark was talking to took one look at their very suspicious looking group and ran out. Clark turned slowly to give Sara a look that would have chilled anyone else to the bone. Thea thought he would very soon regret it.  
  
“Can I help you?” he asked coldly.  
  
“Do you know Laurel Lance?”  
  
Clark’s expression melted into one of confusion.  
  
“Yeah,” he said. “How do you know her?”  
  
“I’m her sister.”  
  
Clark snorted.  
  
“Looking pretty spry for a dead girl,” he said lightly.  
  
“I got better.”  
  
Clark smiled and looked back toward Thea and the boys.  
  
“I’m actually going to go out on a limb and say you’re friends of Green Arrow?” Clark said wryly. “I got his message and then suddenly you all show up? Interesting timing.” None of them answered, but he gestured to the bench across from him. Thea and Tommy squeezed next to Sara, but Curtis was left to either stand or sit next to the person they were planning on interrogating. He sat delicately next to Clark.  
  
“Do you know where she is?” Sara asked without pre-amble.  
  
“I do.” He didn’t elaborate further.  
  
“And yet you seem so calm,” Tommy said. “Then again with your friends space travel must not be so out there.” Clark’s expression didn’t change, damn him.  
  
“When did you find out where she was?” Clark asked. A dedicated reporter, Thea remembered.  
  
“Alright let’s cut the bullshit,” Thea said. “Laurel is on another planet. We talked to a woman named Carol Ferris, who said Laurel was being targeted. We all lost contact with her a week ago, and Carol thinks that means Laurel is dead.”  
  
“Laurel’s not dead,” Clark said confidently.  
  
“We know. She contacted us yesterday. But what she texted didn’t make sense, and she’s still in trouble.”  
  
“She’s not alone, you know. She’s got help. You don’t need to worry about her.”  
  
“We’re her family,” Sara bit out.  
  
“That’s up for debate,” Clark shrugged.  
  
“Listen judge-y,” Tommy snapped. “Thea and I have been looking for Laurel for months. She called Thea from a hospital, and texted her some kind S.O.S. message. I don’t know how we can help her, but we will.”  
  
Clark was silent for a while, looking back and forth between all four of them.  
  
“You’re Tommy?” he asked finally. Tommy nodded. Clark looked toward Thea then. “And you’re Thea?” she nodded. He looked at Curtis, who was still trying to make himself invisible. “And you’re who?”  
  
“I’m—” Curtis started. He didn’t say anything else for a moment. The table looked expectantly at him. “A friend of Thea’s. I’m just…I helped do the search and now I’m invested. I never met Laurel, don’t know anything about her other than Thea and Tommy love her. I know I don’t have a horse in this race, but I’m here and I care so…yeah.”  
  
Clark Kent’s hard facade seemed to melt before their eyes. His smile turned less mocking and more warm, his eyes crinkling at the edges as he looked over Curtis, Tommy, and Thea. Sara started tapping her fingers impatiently, breaking Clark out of his trance.  
  
“What coded message did she send you?”  
  
Thea handed over her phone. Clark took one look at it and laughed. He pulled out his own phone, clicked around, and then held it out in the middle of the table.  
  
“Not dead. Talk soon. Sorry.”  
  
Curtis looked extremely uncomfortable sitting next to the man. He shot a quick look to Thea and mouthed “What the hell?”  
  
When Clark turned his phone around to show them all what was on the screen, though, it all made sense. He'd opened up a text window, started the speech to text function, and it had translated what he said as “Not that talk soup story.”  
  
“Laurel always uses that thing. Usually she’ll fix its mistakes but,” Clark shrugged, “guess she was busy.”  
  
Thea stared down at her own phone, thinking about the message Laurel had meant to send.  
  
“But she hasn’t called back,” Thea muttered. “She hasn’t even texted.”  
  
Clark didn’t respond right away.  
  
“Yeah I haven’t talked to her in couple days either,” he said slowly. It was the first bit of information he’d volunteered without prompting. Thea looked up in shock, and found that Clark was staring at her so intensely she started to fidget. “I guess I can think of another way to get in contact with her, if you don’t mind another field trip.”  
  
“We’re not interested a wild goose chase,” Sara said.  
  
“It won’t be,” Clark assured them. “If this goes right, we’ll all be able to help Laurel ourselves. In person.”  
  
“What? You know someone with a rocket ship?” Tommy sighed.  
  
“Yup,” Clark smiled.  
  
That wasn’t what any of them were expecting.  
  
“Where?” Sara said.  
  
“El Paso, Texas.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, sadly Oliver is being kicked off the field trip. He's not out of the story for good, but I can't very well have a showdown between Superman and Green Arrow happen in the middle of the story when there's higher chance for confusion and mayhem at it happening later. I am all about confusion and mayhem.
> 
> Also Karen Starr (Power Girl) might be pretty blase about rando strangers knowing she's an alien, but Clark certainly isn't. As much as Superman is an archetypal good guy hero, Clark has always been to me an archetypal inquisitive and secretive reporter. I hope I did that side of him justice in this little mutli-sided interrogation.


End file.
